Home > News > UCLA to Receive Donation From SOuthern California Edison for Visitors' Environmental Learning Center at Point Mugu

UCLA to Receive Donation From SOuthern California Edison for Visitors' Environmental Learning Center at Point Mugu

Carolyn Campbell (ccampbel@arts.ucla.edu) (310) 825-6540
For Immediate Use Monday, June 22, 1998.

Southern California Edison (SCE), in its commitment to environmental solutions, is donating $20,000 in co-sponsorship funds to the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design. These partial funds will help provide for a student team to create green construction documents as an applied research project for a visitors’ environmental learning center at Point Mugu wetlands in Ventura County, California. Representatives of SCE will present the check to UCLA Architecture Professor Richard Schoen at a ceremony on Thursday, June 25, at 8:30 am at the Naval Air Weapons Station, Point Mugu.

UCLA architecture students are in partnership on the project along with the U.S. Navy, California Department of Transportation (CALTRANS) and the National Park Service’s Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. With this donation, SCE joins the partnership to interpret to the community this rare ecosystem. SCE is also joined in this effort by the California Air National Guard's 146th Airlift Wing, stationed in the Channel Islands Air National Guard base.

Few of the 4.5 million people who drive north to Oxnard on Pacific Coast Highway every year take any notice of the marsh alongside one stretch of the road near the Point Mugu Naval Air Station in Ventura County. That will change if Schoen and his graduate students get their way. In 1996, Schoen assigned his design studio in sustainable architecture and community planning the project of designing a visitors’ environmental learning center that would make some part of the largest saltwater marsh estuary in Southern California more accessible. The Mugu Lagoon is habitat to seven protected species, 150 species of waterbirds and harbor seals and their pups. The hard part: The class had to solve the problem while adhering to the "green" rules of sustainable architecture -- make as little impact as possible upon the wetlands.

After hundreds of hours at the drawing board and in computer meetings that brought together public partners including CALTRANS, the National Park Service, the Navy, and the public for the first time to reflect on the fate of Mugu Lagoon, the class designed a combined model and visitor center. "Their contributions have been enormous," stated Tom Keeney, senior ecologist at Point Mugu. And there is good reason to hope that their concept may become a reality. Although that initial design studio has concluded, the students, under Schoen’s leadership, are about to initiate research construction documents while working on obtaining construction funding to secure the $1.5 million needed to realize the vision of the many partners that have been involved. "We are extremely grateful to Southern California Edison for this leadership donation, and for making so serious a commitment to the realization of this important community project," said Schoen.

What are the project‘s chances in the real world? Well, several years ago on Earth Day, the National Park Service dedicated the solar-heated, sunlit Satwiwa/Native American Indian Culture Center, now a popular visitors stop at Rancho Sierra Vista/Satwiwa in Newbury Park. "If it weren’t for Dick Schoen’s students who designed and directed construction drawings for the building, we wouldn‘t have gotten it built," states Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area spokeswoman Jean Bray.


Contact: Carolyn Campbell
Phone: (310) 825-6540
Email: ccampbel@arts.ucla.edu