A Trip Down the Wurster Stairwell

Most Environmental Design students, and some others, understand about Wurster Hall. Its design and construction were greeted with considerable verbiage on the part of the committee that created it:

The solution [to the design problem] lay not in adherence to any single ideology or dogma, but rather in finding a reasonable path among a great array of conflicting and competing requirements… giving the greatest importance to conflicting requirements and… finding a way so that the status of each requirement and its conflicts was preserved… We sought not to resolve conflict but to preserve it. [The building was designed to] raise questions more than offer answers.

Well, I have a few questions. What function are those sheet metal brackets in the corners of each stairwell landing supposed to fulfill? Why would anyone bother to tile miniscule portions of the walls and ceilings in the stairwell? What’s behind that wooden wall at the very bottom of the stairs? Why are there two doors into the stairs on the first floor? Can you really park a locomotive on the concrete sunshades? And why don’t they block the sun? Where was the brain of the person who installed clear plumbing pipes in the classroom ceilings? And, finally, the most important question of all-why is the courtyard on the second floor alwas locked? This courtyard contains two planters and two statues — one a copy of the Venus de Milo and the other a modern version of an ancient goddess. Is it, perhaps, sacred to Aphrodite, opened only on holy days for ceremonies performed by white-robed virgins?

We begin our tour of the “College of the Environmentally Deranged” by taking the elevator to the ninth floor, which is as high as it goes. The elevator used to have graffiti-friendly walls; after a stint with vertical carpet, it is now paneled in the same thing “white chalkboards” are made of. The first stop would have been the top balcony, with its stunning view of the Campanile — now, though, the doorknob is disabled. Fortunately, we can still go out onto the ninth floor balcony — the view is almost as good, but in one direction rather than three. It’s still worthwhile to hike up to the 10 1/2th floor, past the former “Office of Pygmy Studies” to where the stairs end. Here is an ideal place for murals — currently on exhibit are three black and white squares depicting a hand with a gun, a family turkey dinner, and two children walking down a road.

We proceed downstairs at a leisurely pace, observing the highlights of 27 years of student creativity. In this ever-changing landscape there currently seem to be fewer set pieces of “art,” like the “evil” Tree of Life on the 9th floor (formerly one of two — the “good” Tree has unfortunately vanished) or even the thermonuclear dancing pig on the seventh floor landing, and more illegible spray painted scrawl, alas. The slogans, in Chinese and German as well as English, range from the allegedly profound (“give love — get love — love!”) and the mildly amusing (“the BART police are tapping my phone”) to the downright obscure (“they said I was a fish/they dipped me into flour/and I became a dish/but I was not sweet and sour”) and completely rational (“Why are architecture students in such a badly designed building?? So they won’t copy”). On the whole, Wursterites seem to ponder politics, police brutality, aesthetics and art, as well as the usual University concerns (“roast the Regents on a spit”).

You may detour on the fifth floor to inspect the pillar where an Arch 1A student christened the building in 1964. The stairs branch off here, where we can observe a technical tour de force, the imposition of a 10’x10’ 3-D map of a planned city onto the wall. Someone recently added a wonderful “CAL” stencil to this masterpiece. The city is near a two-story elegantly rendered man, also worth a look.

Farther down from this is mostly more of the same, though the hedgehog doorstop, the flowers at each stair from the second to the first floor, and the “cactus girls” are notable. At the very bottom, under the stairs, was a manifesto that has been there at least a decade, as a memorial to freshman angst; it has recently been made into a black wall.

It is said that Berkeley is an anonymous, repressive, bureaucratic environment Wurster seems to be the one place where individual students feel allowed to break out.