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Occidental Campus Named One of America's "Most Beautiful"

 

Occidental, together with Stanford, Harvard, Lewis & Clark, the University of Chicago and five other institutions, were picked based on variety of admittedly subjective criteria, including aesthetics, size and geography, and the way they relate to (or are set apart from) their surroundings.

Here's what StructureHub had to say about Occidental:

"(1) Intimate campus, (2) California climate, (3) urban location, etc. There are plenty other colleges in/near Los Angeles that benefit from these things; but Occidental didn't assume these alone are enough to ensure beauty. The small campus also has plenty of impossibly picturesque red tile-roofed buildings similar to those found at Stanford. But really, Occidental's repeated selection as a film location is the best evidence of its beauty (e.g., ‘Orange County', ‘Pat and Mike', ‘Clueless'). Apparently the campus in the movies that looks too-good-to-be-true really does exist."

Myron Hunt, the California architect who also designed the Rose Bowl and the Huntington Library, not only created the original master plan for Occidental but was the supervising campus architect for almost 30 years. (Famed landscape architect Beatrix Farrand landscaped the Quad.) Hunt's lengthy tenure gives the Occidental campus an unusual unity of design and scale.

Occidental has served as a movie (and later television) location since 1920, playing host to such stars as the Marx Brothers, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart, Jane Fonda, Jack Black and Patrick Dempsey. It also has had a starring role in literature, albeit under an alias: the events surrounding the construction of Occidental's Thorne Hall (designed by Myron Hunt) figure prominently in Aldous Huxley's novel After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. (Occidental appears as Tarzana College.)