Fullerton’s Hunt Library Gets a New Life. Will Its Biggest Champions Be a Part of It?

Mid-century modern architecture isn’t always well respected, and Orange County has a checkered relationship with its masterpieces from that era. Significant buildings by Richard Neutra, William Periera, Rudolf Schindler and others haven’t always been treated well here.

Orange Coast College has a fraught history with Neutra’s brilliant designs for the original campus. Neutra’s Mariner’s Medical Arts Building in Newport Beach was subjected to a multi-year tug of war between developers and preservationists. Schindler’s Lovell Beach House on Newport’s Balboa Peninsula, an early modernist icon from the 1920s that attracts admirers from all over the world, could benefit from some rehabilitative love.

But there have been successes, too. Two years after Crystal Cathedral Ministries filed for bankruptcy, its campus full of famous modernist edifices was purchased in 2012 by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange, which promptly announced its intentions to make it the diocese’s new cathedral. The glass-clad main building was tastefully and carefully renovated to accommodate the traditions of the Roman Catholic liturgy. Thankfully, the diocese took pains to respect the original architecture of the entire campus, which contains important work by Neutra, Philip Johnson, Richard Meier and other modernist masters.

Fullerton’s Hunt Library can now be counted in Orange County’s “success” column, if all goes according to plan. In 2019, assemblywoman Sharon Quirk-Silva secured a $2.5 million state grant to renovate and upgrade the handsome and understated building designed by William Pereira, creator of San Francisco’s familiar Transamerica Pyramid and best known in Orange County as the leading architect of the original UC Irvine campus.