USC Legends.
“Through this portal enter the world’s greatest athletes.”
This inscription of bravado above the arched entryway to USC’s spectacular new John McKay Center declares the university’s athletic ideal. Though it may seem a little heavy on the hubris, what lies within backs up USC’s commitment to nurturing its student athletes. They have quite literally put their money where their proverbial mouth is, with a breathtaking $70 million, 110,000sf state-of-the-art facility.
The Center, named for USC’s legendary football coach and unveiled in August 2012, is a remarkable showcase of athletic prowess, a tribute to past champions and a powerful recruiting lure for the aspiring. Award-winning Los Angeles-based RA-DA was charged with designing the McKay Center’s interiors as a clean, modern counterpoint to the exterior’s collegiate Romanesque Revival architecture. RA-DA’s explicit mission was to respect the campus aesthetic and communicate the university’s rich academic and athletic heritage.
‘Despite its regal qualities, the spaces and interiors of the Center would be somehow youthful and energetic,’ said Rania Alomar, principal at RA-DA in charge of the John McKay Center’s interior design. ‘We decided early on to create zones within the project that were active and vibrant nodes. These would be rich in color – either the USC red or gold – and would contain graphics, logos and information on aspects of the sports program and USC history. In some cases, we used the lighting to activate these zones by creating lines of light that added to the strong graphic.’ At the entry points to the strength and conditioning areas in the basement, RA-DA placed Prudential Lighting’s P60 Series, creating repeating lines of light in the corridors leading into the training area.
‘We had this language of a linear light element that marks the space down in the basement where the athletic facilities are,’ said Alomar, who found the linear P62 ideal for this purpose. ‘These again are really simple fixtures that achieve exactly what we wanted, which is this continuous line of light. So that the feature is not the fixture that is getting all the attention, it is the light.’ Alomar wanted the lighting to suggest power, energy and vibrancy to reflect what athletes do there – train to barrel down a field, soar on a basketball court and beat records with ripping speeds. ‘We used [the P62] again in this staccato manner, marching down the corridors, sort of going boom, boom, boom, down the halls,’ said Alomar, who added that she used the P63 in other parts of the interior. ‘It creates this punctuated rhythm of light down the corridors. We use them in this graphic way. We are not glorifying the fixture. We are integrating the light into the design, so it contributes to the overall intent.’
Lack of ambient light made lighting the basement Alomar’s greatest challenge. The lighting needed to be highly functional to obliterate the subterranean feel, and do so without diminishing the distinct design elements. ‘The lighting was critical on this level as we did not want it to feel like a basement. We used a lot of the P59 coves. It’s a great fixture because it achieves what you want in a light cove – it throws the light really evenly down onto the surface without being visible to the eye. Wherever appropriate, we used indirect lighting and coves to add a general sense of lightness without visible fixtures, raising the overall ambient light in the space.’
The project architect, Los Angeles-based HTNB, selected Prudential’s P63 for both design continuity and even, comfortable light on the flat screens in the computer lab. This academic hub is dedicated to producing student athletes as competitive in the classroom as they are in sports, so at some point that inscription above the building’s archway may have to include more than just ‘world’s greatest athletes.’
