FASES DE LA AUDITORÍA

2.69 View to Doe Memorial Library across Memorial Pool, UC Berkeley Photo: Alan Nyri

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plan the College of California’s new campus. As would become a characteristic of his campus designs, Olmsted imagined an irregular, picturesque and informal park-like setting that was on axis with the Golden Gate Bridge. This axial arrangement bespoke of more than merely wanting to capitalize on impressive scenery; it carried a symbolic resonance. California was, in many ways, perceived as the new promised land. Following the gold rush beginning in 1848, the state was envisioned as a new economic power, and simultaneously as a pastoral idyll. These prophecies came to be symbolized by the Golden Gate and so in aligning the university with this structure, Olmsted was aligning it with the special destiny of California itself. Although Olmsted’s plan was never executed, in lining the campus with the Gate he set a precedent which his successors were to follow.

Olmsted’s designs were supplanted by a new plan by architects David Farquharson and Henry Kenitzer, commissioned in 1868 when the College was transformed into the University of California. Their design included a sweeping arc lined with buildings in the then-popular French Empire style. South Hall is the sole building from this scheme to survive. Built in 1873, it is the oldest building at Berkeley. Its façade is of brick and granite, decorated on the north and south sides with cast-iron reliefs depicting fruits and grains native to California, with a mansard roof animated with dormers and chimneys. The campus opened in the same year with only 100 students. Enrolment, however, rapidly grew. During the 1890s student numbers had risen to 2,500, making new buildings an imperative. Furthermore, there emerged a general dissatisfaction with the aesthetics of the campus at this time. One student rued in 1892 that ‘none of the buildings here compare in beauty with the Leland Stanford University’. The growing sense of promise that seemed to radiate from California nurtured the conviction that the state’s university should too embody this promise in its physical setting. With this mindset, the Regents launched an international competition for a comprehensive campus master plan in 1897, financed by Phoebe Apperson Hearst. The competition was grand and ambitious in scale, and, moreover, came to be highly influential in American campus planning in its emphasis on the potential of architectural design. Hearst articulated that,

I have only one wish in this matter – that the plans adopted should be worthy of the great university whose material home they are to provide for…and that they should redound to the glory of the state whose culture and civilisation are to be nursed and developed at the university.¹⁰⁰

From the outset, this vision was strongly shaped by the classical architectural idiom and the Beaux-Arts movement.¹⁰¹

The competition coincided with the burgeoning of the Beaux-Arts and City Beautiful movements, much popularized by the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The fair dazzled North America with an ideal vision for public buildings and their surroundings, and presented Berkeley with a new language to express the unique destiny of California and its educational republic. Out of approximately 100 entrants, the 11 competition finalists were all École des Beaux-Arts trained. The winning entry, by Frenchman Emile Bénard was an urban plan based on grids of boulevards and squares. Yet soon after he was announced as winner in 1900, problems began to emerge. Speaking little English and unwilling to come to Berkeley to supervise the plan, Bénard was replaced by John Galen Howard.

During his tenure as campus architect from 1902–1924, Howard produced several revised plans and designed numerous buildings in the Beaux-Arts tradition.¹⁰²

The Berkeley campus is still to a large extent underpinned by Howard’s master plan. His vision was informed by two principles.

Firstly, he adhered to Beaux-Arts planning. Secondly, he utilized the metaphorical capacity of the built environment – both in its organization and architecture – to capture the zeitgeist of the young state and the ambitions of the university that represented it. The plan was based upon a system of axes hinged upon a major east–west axis aligned with the Golden Gate Bridge, creating a campus of classical and monumental organization. The Beaux-Arts composition was enlivened by an interweaving of minor and major thoroughfares, some orientated north to south and others east to west. Some axes were open-ended and others were closed; some were perpendicular and others sinewing to the contours of the land. Within the scheme, alike disciplines were clustered together. Agricultural and natural sciences occupied the west of the central allée, the humanities the centre, and engineering and physical sciences the east, and all were

2.70 Sather Gate, UC Berkeley Photo: David Sanger Photography/Alamy

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linked by a common architectural guise. Howard designed buildings of varying sizes united by a consistent use of white Raymond granite, red tile roofs and classical details. The campus appeared united by a collective image, and its classical character carried connotations of Athenian wisdom signifying the scholastic and cultural aspirations of the university and California at large. The large Agricultural Complex, occupying a prominent position on the main axis at its western end, demonstrates how architectural detail was used in ideological fashion.

Hilgard Hall (1917) is one of its three constituent buildings. Its west façade is dominated by an imposing, giant Tuscan colonnade with Renaissance-style sgraffito friezes of fruit, flowers, farm animals, native plants, baskets and cornucopias overflowing with the products of the land ornamenting the entablature and window spandrels. The message is that of the fecundity of Berkeley and California in both an agrarian and an intellectual sense.¹⁰³

Across campus, a hierarchy of structures was created through scale and detail. With its imposing proportions, fine ornamentation and central placement on the principal axis, the library was established at the apex of this ranking (Figure 2.69). Its site, wrote Howard, ‘has been more seriously considered, perhaps, than any other single question relating to the plan, unless it be the main axis’. Located on the southern boundary at the midpoint of the main allée, the Doe Memorial Library projects further forward than most of its neighbours emphasizing its importance within the plan, a concept reinforced by its impressive façade. Robust and massive, the Raymond granite façade carries a symmetrical progression of engaged Corinthian columns raised aloft on a tall basement, and framing large windows.

Symbols of Athenian wisdom decorate this façade. Athena presided over the main entrance as a bronze bust, while her serpents coiled themselves amongst books and acanthus leaves on the columns’

capitals.¹⁰⁴

In 1908 construction began on the formal entrance to the campus – Sather Gate and Bridge (Figure 2.70). The gate terminated the south point of a secondary north–south axis. In organizational terms it reinforced the campus’s axial structure while ideologically, it embodied the pedagogic ideals and ambitions of the university. Howard’s design for Sather Gate consists of four masonry piers clad in granite, each bearing a glass globe. Ornate bronze grills and an arch span the space between the piers, creating a welcoming transparency

apt for a state university. The university insignia occupies the centre of the arch. Inside the gate, a concrete bridge, lined with classical balustrades, spans Strawberry Creek to lead into the heart of the campus. The gate no longer marks the ingress to the campus proper, for in the 1940s the university purchased the block of Telegraph Avenue to the south that now houses the Student Union and Sproul Hall. Nevertheless, it has maintained its status as a focal point for political demonstrators or religious preachers.¹⁰⁵

Howard’s master plan gained its visual peak in 1914 with the completion of Sather Tower, the campus’s most prominent and unifying landmark (Figure 2.71). ‘It will be the most salient feature,’ wrote Howard, ‘dominating the composition in the same way that a cathedral tower dominates and unifies the vast and varied fabric.’ Positioned at the intersection of two secondary north–south and east–west axes, its lofty presence reinforced the Beaux-Arts layout. Stylistically, the Sather Tower was modelled on the campanile of Piazza San Marco in Venice. Formed of a Raymond granite shaft soaring 94 metres from a balustraded podium and approached on three sides by expansive steps, the tower is deserved of the epithet ‘a lighthouse of learning’.

At the corners of the upper zone are four plinths carrying pyramidal obelisks topped with flaming bronze urns. The whole culminates in a spire terminating in a spiked bronze lantern. These bronze flames and spire symbolize Berkeley’s pursuit of the light of truth, serving, Howard explained, to ‘point the University’s way upward…unifying its ideals and punctuating its message’. To the west of the tower extends Campanile Way, an important secondary east–west axis that provides a core pedestrian spine within the campus’s classical heart.

Providing views to the east of the Sather Tower and views to the west of the Golden Gate Bridge, the route proffers a visual connection between these two icons of the university’s mission and philosophy.

The axis was enforced by the placement of Wheeler Hall in 1917, opposite to the Doe Memorial Library (Figure 2.72).¹⁰⁶

The campus core as designed by Howard remains as one of the most extensive and comprehensive Beaux-Arts schemes to be erected in the United States. Enjoying a free creative reign on campus, his vision shaped Berkeley. However, with a change in university personnel in the 1920s, Howard’s decisions were increasingly challenged.

Relations between the administration and Howard deteriorated critically to such an extent that in 1924 he was dismissed. Howard’s 2.71 Sather Tower, UC Berkeley

Photo: Andrew Rittenburg

2.72 Wheeler Hall, UC Berkeley Photo: Stefan Didak

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Beaux-Arts vision was largely respected by his successors and new buildings harmonized with the old. The succeeding supervising architects George W. Kelham (1927–1938) and Arthur Brown Jr (1938–1948) held fast to Howard’s master plan, designing buildings in a pared-down classicism, such as McLaughlin Hall (1931), Sproul Hall (1941) and the Bancroft Library Annex (1949).

In 1948, however, the role of supervising architect was replaced by the Office of Architects and Engineers, and the development of the campus began to proceed along very different lines. The university entered into the greatest period of expansion in its history.

Enclosed by the city and the foothills, the campus’s lack of building land prompted the university to adopt a policy of building tall, infill structures. Central campus buildings erected during the 1950s to 1970s generally adopted one of two approaches. The first involved the continuation of the neo-classical architectural idiom espoused by the early structures, albeit simplified and plainer. Mulford Hall, Lewis Hall, and Donner Laboratory illustrate this type, often sharing a vocabulary of symmetrical façades, hipped red tile roofs and minimal ornament. Contrastingly, the second approach departed from the established stylistic language. A variety of alien architectural styles invaded the campus, such as Alumni House in the International Style and Wurster Hall in the Brutalist mode. Buildings grew taller:

the six-storey Earth Sciences Building (now McCone Hall, 1961), seven-storey Latimer Hall (1963) and ten-storey Evans Hall (1971).

These structures frequently possessed flat roofs, plain concrete or stucco façades, huge expanses of physically and visually similar spaces, and proportions that eclipsed their predecessors. Moreover, these buildings broke away from the master plan, and their siting was governed by opportunism. This ad hoc approach has since been attacked for its deleterious effect on campus vistas and natural landscapes. In several cases these Modernist buildings were sited in prized outdoor areas, interrupting the axes and formal spaces of the earlier master plans. Evans Hall, for instance, has been widely condemned. It obstructs the east–west central allée from the Hearst Mining Circle to the Golden Gate Bridge. Moffit Library (1970) similarly blocked this axis, pivotal to the original conception of the Beaux-Arts campus. Following campus demonstrations in 1964,

Frank McShane entitled an article ‘The Horrors of Berkeley, or Did Architecture Make Students Riot’ (Art News, September 1965). In his article, ‘A Campus that went Astray’, Allen Temko lamented ‘the devastation of the once magnificent campus of the University of California in Berkeley’ (San Francisco Chronicle, 24 April 1978).¹⁰⁷

As a complex urban environment, the campus has necessarily been the subject of continual growth and change as it responds to the evolving demands of higher education. The difficulties in preserving the distinctive quality installed by older buildings and landscapes while reacting to expanding student bodies, programmes and modern technologies has been a continual concern. Yet Berkeley has succeeded largely in retaining those place-making characteristics which are essential ingredients to campus identity.

Undoubtedly, the setting contributes to its sense of place. Howard was sensitive to the power of nature and synthesized the college with the natural landscape, creating a campus prized for its natural beauty. The meandering Strawberry Creek with its tree-lined edges encircles the campus core like a green necklace. Green spaces, both formal and informal, offer places for recreation and repose, including the Grinell Natural Area, Eucalyptus Grove, Memorial Glade and Faculty Glade. Vistas glimpsed to the western frontier proffer splendid views to San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge, evoking the spirit of optimism in which the university was founded.

The university has grown vastly in proportion since Howard prepared his 1899 master plan, yet the spirit which informed it is still very much alive. Howard’s classical core is the defining essence of Berkeley’s built environment. It is shaped by an orderly and intelligible Beaux-Arts layout, punctuated by landmarks such as Sather Gate and Sather Tower which stand as tangible symbols of the institution.

Howard left a legacy of visual harmony linked by shared materials, colours and textures (white granite or concrete walls, bronze or wood trim, red tile roofs) and classical motifs. This unity is enlivened by an interplay of shapes, sizes and placings as well as the interplay of major and minor axes. In its organization and classical references, the campus has been a lucid embodiment of the Californian ethos and the ambitions of the university. The result is a campus of strong self-identity.

2.73 Plan, UCLA

Of the nine constituent schools of the University of California, the Los Angeles outpost (UCLA) has the highest student total (39,650) and the most industrious building programme ($1.7 billion deployed between 1986 and 2005) despite its 419 acre campus being amongst the smallest in the system. Currently consisting of over 170 buildings, the campus has grown to large proportions in a relatively short time-span (Figure 2.74).

Founded in 1919, its downtown LA location quickly proved inadequate for the burgeoning institution and in 1925 the Westwood site, chosen for its accessible yet picturesque setting on rolling terrain overlooking the ocean, was purchased for UCLA’s new campus. David

Allison was appointed Executive Architect, to work alongside George Kelham, the supervising architect from Berkeley. Kelham devised a grand Beaux-Arts scheme, arranged around a principal east–west axis.

The uneven site was accommodated in a series of dramatic terraces and steps graduated down the western face of the hill. Four large buildings, which were to become UCLA’s signature buildings – Royce Hall, Powell Library, Chemistry and Physics – were grouped along the main axis. Royce Hall, the campus’s first building, established the precedent for the Lombardian Romanesque style which held sway at UCLA until the Second World War (Figure 2.75). Historical revivalism was then rife in America, and the Romanesque enjoyed particular