$700 Million USC Village Opens As Latest Campus Expansion
This month, the University of Southern California completed the largest development project in school history when the $700 million USC Village officially opened. The 15-acre campus addition includes housing for 2,500 students, 25 retailers, a 30,000-square-foot fitness center, and a dining hall that evokes images of Hogwarts.
At the top of the list of retailers inside the space are Amazon Campus Store, Bank of America, CorePower Yoga, FedEx, Solé Bicycles, Starbucks, Target, Trader Joe’s, and Wahlburgers. Those shops, as well as the additional food and clothing outlets, will be open to the university community as well as the surrounding neighborhood (before 10 p.m., that is, when it becomes a students-only zone for the evening).
The entire USC Village space increases the school’s University Park footprint in Los Angeles by a third.
Despite $36 million in total concessions by USC — $20 million toward the city’s affordable housing fund and a $16 million fire station for the area — there are concerns that the new addition to the neighborhood could further insulate the school from the world outside of its gates.
Los Angeles Times’ Architecture Critic Christopher Hawthorne expressed his own misgivings, viewing the new space as a failing to really fit in with the rest of campus or the surrounding neighborhood’s architecture.