This Date in UCSF History: UCSF Expanding

Originally published in Synapse - The UCSF student newspaper on Oc.t 9, 1963.

A long-range plan to meet the physical development needs of the San Francisco campus until 1980 was approved in principle by the Regents of the University at their September meeting in Santa Barbara.

The Regents directed continuing development of the plan for later consideration in detail. Meanwhile, authorization was given for an essential first step: relocating to a site across Parnassus Avenue from Moffitt Hospital the building that will house the expanded Out Patient Clinics.

This structure, on which work will begin after July 1, 1965, was to have been located behind the present Clinics Building.

Under the long-range development proposal, city blocks (portions of which the University already owns) will be added to the Medical Center. The result would be to extend the central campus area west to Fifth Avenue, north to the line formed by Irving and Carl Streets, and east to Hillway.

Parnassus would be depressed from Arguello to Third, and north-south streets within the extended campus limits would be closed.

This would allow a pedestrian mall to unify and provide a desirable University environment for the central campus area.

Objective of the proposal is to provide the physical setting for an academic plan in which the campus “will develop, through the health sciences, a new understanding of many facets of man's relationships with his environment which affect his health and welfare.”

Shaped by this concept of human ecology, “the professional schools will grow and be enriched, the Graduate Division will expand and flourish, and there will come into being a School of Health Sciences with an unusual and challenging upper division program emphasizing biological approaches to the behavior of man.”

The plan assumes an increase in student enrollment from 2,000 to 5,600, with possibilities of further growth. Most patient care areas will be consolidated at the east and west peripheries of the campus.

The concentration of public service facilities at peripheral areas of the campus provides easy access for patients and eliminates heavy public traffic from the central campus area.

Except for a new wing on Moffitt Hospital (to be linked to the relocated clinics by several stories of corridors forming an overpass across Parnassus), major new construction would be concentrated largely on sites adjacent to the present central campus area.

Portions of the steep slopes north of Parnassus will be utilized for parking structures (about 3,000 cars), with the roofs creating plazas with outstanding views of city and sea.

The side of Mt. Sutro, too steeply sloped for high-rise buildings, will be preserved as a green belt, interspersed with smaller-scale construction such as student housing and a conference center.

A type of cable car line has been suggested to provide transportation from a courtyard adjoining the Health Sciences Instruction and Research Building, now under construction, to the summit of Mt. Sutro.

The development plan was drafted by Consulting Architect John Lyon Reid and Consulting Landscape Architect Robert Royston in collaboration with Provost Saunders, Campus Architect Richard Grenfell, members of the Campus Planning Committee, and other key members of the University faculty and staff.