The campus of the University of California, Berkeley, and its surrounding community are home to a number of notable buildings by early 20th-century campus architect John Galen Howard, his peer Bernard Maybeck (best known for the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts), and their colleague Julia Morgan. Subsequent tenures as supervising architect held by George W. Kelham and Arthur Brown, Jr. saw the addition of several buildings in neoclassical and other revival styles, while the building boom after World War II introduced modernist buildings by architects such as Vernon DeMars, Joseph Esherick, John Carl Warnecke, Gardner Dailey, Anshen & Allen, and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Recent decades have seen additions including the postmodernist Haas School of Business by Charles Willard Moore, Soda Hall by Edward Larrabee Barnes, and the East Asian Library by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects.
Much of the UC Berkeley campus, including the major landmarks, is in the city limits of Berkeley. A portion of the UC Berkeley property extends into Oakland. - Compare to the campus map here
Beginnings (1860–1900)
The first of farmland in Berkeley were acquired by the privately held College of California in 1858, and the site was dedicated on April 16, 1860. Frederick Law Olmsted was commissioned to design the campus in 1864. Olmsted's design followed the City Beautiful movement and was sensitive to the natural topography, including Strawberry Creek, which ran through the site, and proposed an east–west axis aligned with the Golden Gate. If Olmsted's plan had been implemented, the campus would consist of student villages for living and learning, linked by meandering paths and surrounded by parks. He praised the site's distance from burgeoning San Francisco, providing both "a suitable degree of seclusion and a suitable degree of association" with the cosmopolitan world. However, only "two considerable buildings would be required at [this] early period": a library and general assembly hall with classrooms. The first two common buildings, completed as North and South Hall in 1873, were built approximately where Olmsted had proposed.
After the College of California became the public University of California in 1868, Olmsted's plans were set aside as impractical (mainly parkland, with only two major buildings) in favor of new plans from David Farquharson in 1869, although these plans also were never fully implemented. Shortly after Daniel Coit Gilman was named the president of the University of California in 1872, William Hammond Hall wrote to Samuel F. Butterworth, a regent, and proposed to design the campus without remuneration for his services. Hall presented his final plan in February 1874; it was adopted and implemented slowly over the next twenty-five years, generally following Olmsted's ideas. Very little of these early University of California campus design implementations () remain, with the Victorian Second Empire-style South Hall (1873, Kenitzer and Farquharson) and Piedmont Avenue (Olmsted) being notable exceptions.
What is considered the historic campus today resulted from the 1898 "International Competition for the Phoebe Hearst Architectural Plan for the University of California," funded by the wealthy eponymous philanthropist mother of William Randolph Hearst and initially held in Antwerp; eleven finalists were judged again in San Francisco the next year. This unprecedented competition came about from one-upmanship between the prominent Hearst and Stanford families of the Bay Area. In response to the founding of Stanford University, the Hearst Family decided to "adopt" the fledgling University of California and develop their own world-class institution. Although Émile Bénard, a Frenchman, won the competition, he disliked the "uncultured" San Francisco atmosphere and refused to personally revise the plan to the site. He was replaced by fourth-place winner John Galen Howard, who would become UC Berkeley's resident campus architect in 1901. Only University House, designed by architect Albert Pissis and completed in 1911 as a residence for the President of the University of California, was placed according to the original Bénard plan; today it is the residence of UC Berkeley's Chancellor. However, the general campus orientation initially proposed by Olmsted and followed by his successors has persisted, with the main axis of the campus running uphill from west to east along what is now Campanile Way.
Beaux-Arts era (1901–1950) For the first half of the 20th century, Berkeley campus architecture was led by a series of three notable Bay Area architects famed for their work in San Francisco: John Galen Howard (1901–1924), George W. Kelham (1927–1936), and Arthur Brown, Jr. (1938–1948).
Howard designs the classical core The oldest parts of the campus that remain were built in the Beaux-Arts Classical style in the early 1900s, which was the style preferred by John Galen Howard and Phoebe Hearst (who paid his salary). This area is now referred to as the "classical core" of the campus. Howard reoriented the main campus axis to its present-day alignment along Campanile Way, as a continuation of the line of Center Street. This divided the campus into four pieces: the park-like west side, as a buffer to the city of Berkeley; the central core, with its monumental buildings; the hilly east, "a majestic natural background and climax to the composition"; and the south, given to athletic pursuits. With the support of University President Benjamin Ide Wheeler, Howard designed more than twenty buildings, which set the tone for the campus up until its expansion in the 1950s and 1960s. These included the Hearst Greek Theatre (1903), California Hall (1905), the Hearst Memorial Mining Building (1907), Sather Gate (1908), Durant Hall (1911), Wellman Hall (1912), the Sather Tower (1914; nicknamed "the Campanile" after its architectural inspiration, St Mark's Campanile in Venice), Doe Memorial Library (1917), Gilman Hall (1917), Hilgard Hall (1917), Wheeler Hall (1917), California Memorial Stadium (1923), (Old) LeConte Hall (1923), Haviland Hall (1924), and Hesse Hall (1924). Buildings he regarded as temporary, nonacademic, or not particularly "serious" were designed in shingle or Collegiate Gothic styles, including North Gate Hall (1906), Dwinelle Annex (1920), and Stephens Hall (1923).
Multiple buildings and structures in the classical core are listed as a single aggregated California Historical Landmark (no. 946) and also are listed individually in the National Register of Historic Places:
Founders' Rock University House Faculty Club and Glade Hearst Greek Theatre Hearst Memorial Mining Building Doe Memorial Library Sather Tower and Esplanade Hall Sather Gate and Bridge Hearst Gymnasium California Hall Durant Hall Wellman Hall Hilgard Hall Giannini Hall Wheeler Hall North Gate Hall South Hall
John Galen Howard retired in 1924, his support base gone with both Phoebe Hearst's death and President Wheeler's resignation in 1919. William Randolph Hearst, seeking to memorialize his mother, contributed to Howard's resignation by commissioning Bernard Maybeck and Julia Morgan to design a series of dramatic buildings on the southern part of the campus. These were originally to include a huge domed auditorium, a museum, an art school, and a women's gymnasium, all arranged on an eastward esplanade and classically oriented towards the campanile. However, only the Hearst Women's Gymnasium was completed before the Great Depression, at which point Hearst decided to focus on his estate at San Simeon instead.
Steam tunnels Underneath UC Berkeley's oldest buildings is a system of steam tunnels which carry steam for heat and power. During the 1960s, Berkeley students chained the doorknobs of the Chancellor's office in protest over the Vietnam War. The Chancellor, having no other way in or out of the building, used the steam tunnels to escape. Afterwards, the exterior double doors on that building were changed so they only had one doorknob, and this remains today.
Kelham continues precedent
From 1927 until his death in 1936, George W. Kelham was supervising architect for the campus; Kelham previously had arrived on the West Coast in the wake of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire and remained there to design notable replacement buildings, including the San Francisco Public Library that was integrated into Howard's Beaux-Arts design for the city government complex at Civic Center. Subsequently, he was appointed the supervising architect of the campus at UCLA in 1925.
During his tenure, Kelham never prepared an overall campus plan update, which fell instead on Warren C. Perry, who had succeeded Howard as the head of the School of Architecture. Kelham designed several individual buildings, including Bowles Hall, 1928; Valley Life Sciences Building, 1930; International House, 1930; Moses Hall, 1931; McLaughlin Hall, 1931; the Engineering Materials Laboratory, 1931 (later replaced by Davis Hall); and the Men's Gym, 1933 (remodeled and now named Haas Pavilion). Bowles Hall is California's oldest state-owned dormitory and is also listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Perry is credited with designing Edwards Stadium, 1932.
Two mosaic murals by Helen Bell Bruton (Sculpture and Dance) and Florence Alston Swift (Music and Painting) were commissioned by the Works Progress Administration and installed in 1936 on the Old Art Gallery, which originally served as a small utility building designed by Howard and completed in 1904. After Kelham died in 1936, the architectural duties in progress fell on his junior partner, Harry Thomsen.
Brown's neoclassical approach
From 1938 to 1948, the San Francisco architect Arthur Brown Jr., who had designed several notable buildings in San Francisco, Washington D.C., Stanford University, and elsewhere, served as campus planner and chief architect; he was appointed during the planning phase for Stern Hall and the Administration Building, which would later be renamed Sproul Hall. Brown's Beaux-Arts credentials had been established with the design of San Francisco City Hall (1915).
With his 1944 general plan, Brown broke the long east–west cross-campus axis that dated back to the earliest plans by Olmsted; he shortened it to terminate just before the northeast corner of campus, where he had planned library and mathematics buildings. In addition, he designated uses for the unused northwest (forestry, agriculture, and home economics) and southeast (jurisprudence, anthropology, and arts) corners. The final version of the 1944 plan reduced open spaces on campus to a minimum, as maintaining the Beaux-Arts precedents using low, sprawling buildings in the constrained site was inadequate to handle the forecasted explosive growth in enrollment, and he resigned his post in 1948. At Berkeley, he designed many of his last works, including the Cyclotron Building, 1940; Sproul Hall, 1941; Minor Hall, 1941; Donner Laboratory, 1942; and Bancroft Library (originally Doe Annex), 1949.
Postwar growth (1950–1980) 1951 Campus Plan Study