Ridge Walk North Living & Learning Neighborhood (LLN)

Looking north from the Coalition building. (Matt Hansen / UC San Diego media photo)

Inaugurated in 1970 as Third College, Thurgood Marshall College is one of the now eight undergraduate colleges at UC San Diego. Of particular interest to BuildSD, it was also the original home of the Urban and Rural Development department (now the department of Urban Studies and Planning). However, as the university sought to expand housing capacity amid the incoming student housing guarantee, Third College’s original dorms needed to be replaced.

The new Ridge Walk North Living & Learning Neighborhood (LLN) replaces the former two-story residential complex known as the Marshall College “lowers” (lower-division housing) with a set of three dense mixed-use residential towers and a new academic building, Brian C. Malk Hall, intended to house the Economics department. The School of Global Policy & Strategy (GPS) will also move to the new complex, which includes a total of 2,400 beds.

The buildings are named Alianza, after the Spanish word for “alliance,” Umoja, after a Swahili word meaning “unity,” and Coalition. New classrooms are located in Coalition and Malk Hall, and offices are scattered throughout all buildings. A new deli and retail market in Coalition, Goody’s Marketplace, replaces the former Marshall College retail market of the same name. 

The residential dining location for Marshall College, OceanView, is unaffected by the construction, although the surrounding courtyard and Pangea apartments have been moved out of Marshall College and transferred to the Upper-Division Housing department.

The “Voices” mural itself, shown here, is slated to be reinstalled in the LLN. (Samuel Sharp / BuildSD)

Ridge Walk North is the third LLN to be built on campus. The term LLN indicates a mixed-use campus area specifically designed to support residential, retail, and academic uses. Both Sixth and Eighth Colleges are also housed in LLNs, with Sixth College having relocated from the former “Camp Snoopy” dorms to the North Torrey Pines LLN several years ago.

The buildings themselves may be new, but when the complex opened in November, Marshall College provost Leslie Carver emphasized the historic foundations of the project and the college. According to Carver, “Marshall was founded 55 years ago by student activists who emphasized student participation in governance … we have worked very hard to bring that vision into this space.”

That dedication, in some part, seems to have paid off. Several sculptures from the former Marshall College campus, including the iconic Sojourner Truth statue, have been relocated and re-installed inside the LLN, and in the spring, Nam June Paik’s wonderfully esoteric Something Pacific was reinstalled in the Communication building courtyard after being placed off display due to construction impacts. The figures of Something Pacific have always been a monument to the oddness and change inherent in communication, and now, they live in the shadow of three shiny new Marshall College buildings–a monument to continual change in its own right.

Nam June Paik, Something Pacific (1986) [Photo: Samuel Sharp / BuildSD]