Claremont, Calif.
Just about everyone here agrees that Pomona College's five-year-old Smith Campus Center is an exceptionally handsome building. Designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects, its arches, red-tile roofs, and neo-Classical colonnade perfectly complement the college's historic buildings -- especially Bridges Hall of Music, a Spanish Renaissance auditorium from 1915 that the campus center faces across a grassy expanse of quadrangle. And while the campus center is large, with 65,000 square feet of floor space, its mass is so cleverly disguised that it seems to fit its location perfectly.

There's just one problem. Pomona's students don't much like the place.

Sure, they'll come for meetings upstairs, and the weekly "Table Manners" dance event in the awkward basement social room draws crowds (the event features not salad forks and fish knives but DJ's playing trance and hip-hop). Renovations last summer to the student-run sandwich shop, the Coop Fountain, have made it more inviting, and more popular, than it had been. It has sofas and booths now, along with the metal cafe tables and chairs chosen by Mr. Stern's firm, which decorated the building in addition to designing it.

But the game room hidden up on the second floor is still empty a lot of the time, and the three first-floor lounges in the front of the building are typically occupied by one or two students each, studying in silence amid formal, pastel-colored furniture and fussy window treatments that look like they belong in the lobby of a suburban Hilton.

In good weather, students and professors fill the courtyard's wooden chairs and tables around noon, but for much of the rest of the day the courtyard can be all but deserted. Skateboard wheels echo eerily in the long, lonely passageway leading from there to the east end of the building. The silence is broken occasionally by the slamming of one of the building's heavy metal doors, which are loud enough to disrupt any conversation and terminate any nap.

"From the outside I love it," says Tyler Velten, a senior who is an art major and a forward on the men's basketball team. "From the inside it's the worst place I've ever been in." The campus center reminds him of a hospital, he says.

"It's stunningly beautiful -- it's just breathtaking," says Ann G. Quinley, the dean of students. "But when you try to live in it, it isn't warm. There are no big, floppy chairs." What's missing, she says, "is a place where students go and hang out."

But Mr. Stern says the building was designed to be more than just a student hangout, although he did meet frequently with students during the planning. "The campus center had many purposes," he says. "It was not called the student center, let's put it that way." The college's trustees and administrators, he says, wanted a building in which students and faculty members could meet, as well as a design that would bring a new dignity to a prominent site. The old student center, he says, was a "mishmash" that administrators and trustees thought made a poor impression on visitors.

Mr. Stern says he has not been back to Pomona since the building's dedication, and knows nothing about how his building is being used. "Buildings evolve and change over time," he says.

What makes the Smith Campus Center unusual isn't that its problems are worse than any other building's, but that Pomona's students have complained about them more. Lately the college's administrators have been listening, as have its trustees. Changes are being made to the $18.3-million facility. And ideas that once seemed far-fetched -- like putting the game room on the main floor, where the little-used lounges are now -- are being taken more seriously.

Last summer the Coop Fountain was expanded onto what had been its rear patio, making the eatery both brighter and more spacious. At the same time, a redecoration brought red walls (instead of white) and wood-look flooring (instead of linoleum), along with the booths and sofas. And the college spent more than $200,000 on a new staircase leading to the game room directly above.

Students and administrators alike hoped the staircase would make the campus center a little more like the building it replaced, in which the game room and the Coop Fountain were side by side -- and in which students seemed to shoot a lot more pool. So far, however, the staircase doesn't seem to have done the trick.

The concrete paving of the courtyard was darkened slightly to make it less blinding on sunny days. Colorful banners were hung in a big, two-story space at the other end of the building that had felt particularly monastic. In the basement, the social room was repainted from white to what the building's director, Neil Gerard, refers to as a "mottled dark-blue black purple thing." The college bought some big new sofas that line the walls at one end of the room.

And students recently removed most of the tiles from the social room's drop ceiling, leaving just the metal grid. The hope was that the space would look less polite, more industrial. "It's ugly," acknowledges Danielle Ticoulat-Bowers, a senior who is on both the student government's Committee for Campus Life and Activities and its Smith Campus Center Improvement Committee. But for dance parties, she says, it's OK.

Elsewhere in the building, other changes are in the works. To soften the courtyard more, planters have been ordered that will hang on the second-floor wall over the colonnade. New colored lights are being installed at the bases of the courtyard's four trees, to make the space more interesting at night. And soon a new set of planters will define a new area for outdoor seating alongside the Sagehen Cafe, a restaurant near the Coop Fountain that serves lunch and dinner to students as well as faculty members and administrators.

The cafe has been a hot topic lately. The cafe's liquor license was recently changed so that it can serve until midnight, instead of closing at 9 p.m., and Ari Greenberg, the student-government president, hopes to see the cafe become a place where juniors and seniors meet for a beer. (Downtown Claremont, only a few blocks away, has several upscale restaurants but no student hangouts.)

"The Coop Fountain epitomizes the potential for growth," Mr. Greenberg says. "You throw some couches in there, and some booths, you throw some red on the walls, and that place is jumping."

Hoping for a similar success with the cafe, the student government sponsored a contest in which students suggested new looks for its interior. The contest attracted almost 20 entries, from which two have been sent out to a contractor for cost estimates. One of those is by a freshman, Carey McDonald, and the other is by Mr. Velten, the senior art major, who would enliven the rectangular room by turning a concrete structural column into a mosaic representation of an orange tree stretching its branches over a new bar. The contest, he says, is "a good place to start to juice up" the campus center. "It's a very conservative building, but I think it can have more life."

"Conservative" is the perfect word for the campus center, and that may be the root of its difficulties. It's easy to imagine trustees oohing and aahing as they walk through on tours, but not high-school students. It's also easy to understand the dilemma facing the architects hired by colleges to plan buildings for their 19-year-olds: The people approving those plans are not regulars in game rooms or at parties with hip-hop and trance -- they are deans and presidents, lawyers and bankers. The irony of the Smith Center is that it does have one room that would be perfect for late-night parties. It's known as "201," and it has vaulted ceilings and cozy niches. It would make a great club, if it weren't the room reserved for trustees' meetings.

Next fall, says David W. Oxtoby, Pomona's new president, the college will convene a committee to consider the fate of a large basement area that now houses academic departments whose buildings are being renovated. Mr. Oxtoby is quick to praise the Smith Center as "superb architecturally," but he also seems more amenable than his predecessor, Peter Stanley, to approving changes to the building. "You take what you have and see what you can do with it," he says cheerfully.

Mr. Gerard, the building's director, says the college will be careful in hiring design consultants for the basement area. He wants to find a company that understands how the space is going to be used. That means, he says, "not necessarily grunge, but comfortable, less formal -- it doesn't matter if my feet are on the couch." He adds: "The reaction to the spaces that have that kind of furniture here is great."

Ironically, one of the things people like best about the campus center is also a big disincentive when it comes to making serious changes: It is constructed of poured concrete, like many of the college's older buildings. The technique gives the exterior a pleasing richness of texture, but it means that altering the interior is a costly proposition.

Mr. Gerard says that no campus center can afford to be static. "You see an evolution of need," he says, as trends wax and wane. "Campus centers particularly, more than most buildings, need to be able to respond to the community."

Could the college have avoided the problems that have bedeviled the campus center? Mr. Gerard isn't sure. Planning it took five years, he says, and students were consulted at every turn. But students' interests change, he says, and "the building is going to come online two or three years after you finish the planning, and half to three-quarters of your major constituency, the student body, will have no idea what to expect."

"They say, Well, you didn't ask me."

Ms. Quinley, the dean of students, gallantly takes some of the blame for the building's difficulties, because it was the first major building project she was involved with. "I kind of fell down in my ability to look at a drawing and envision a room," she says.

But she also holds the architects responsible for twice submitting plans that, when they were turned over to contractors for cost estimates, came in far above the college's spending limit. "I feel like they had to have known" that they were designing a building that cost too much, she says. "That led to us not being able to finish the basement, which would have had a pub, practice rooms, a party room," she says. "We had a real student area down there."

Mr. Stern says "there were things that were cut, as there always are in any building." But he adds:"I think the building succeeds as a work of art, and as such enhances Pomona College."

There he and Ms. Quinley agree. "The building is gorgeous," she says. "It will probably be there for 200 years. And things will happen that will warm it up."