Royce Hall

Los Angeles, United States

Exterior only

Visible from the street; the inside is private.

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Royce Hall, completed in 1929 on UCLA's Westwood campus, stands as one of the university's four original buildings and its most iconic landmark. Designed by the Los Angeles architectural firm Allison & Allison—James Edward Allison and his brother David Clark Allison—the structure rises 79.52 meters in the Lombard Romanesque style, its brick and tile exterior drawing inspiration from northern Italian sources. The building's distinctive twin towers abstractly reference the Abbey Church of Sant'Ambrogio in Milan and evoke the heritage of the College of California's predecessor campus in Oakland. Named after philosopher Josiah Royce, a UC Berkeley graduate, Royce Hall originally functioned as the university's main classroom facility. Its 1,800-seat auditorium, initially designed for speech acoustics, underwent successive remodelings to emerge by 1982 as a regionally significant concert hall and UCLA's primary performing arts venue.