This University is nearly a century and a half old — not long by European or even American standards, but mature for the West Coast. Although the Society of Jesus founded Santa Clara College, now the University of Santa Clara, in 1851, it was not chartered until 1855, after the College of California, now the University of California, was incorporated. Stanford, founded in 1891, is a baby by comparison. This is why it is known as the “junior university”; it still believes that someday it will catch up.

South Hall, the oldest existing building on campus, was, as the gilt letters over the entrance proclaim, built in 1873. It and North Hall were set on a graded hill and in old pictures they appear to be the only buildings for miles. This building was designed by David Farquharson, the University’s second planner, and originally contained the university offices and the agriculture department — hence the panels on the north and south sides depicting produce and the plant motifs on the central staircase. The building later became the College of Commerce when a new agriculture building was built in 1888. Professor Yale Braunstein, who disappointingly did not mention this manuscript when acknowledging his sources at his Cal Day lecture in 2003, pointed out that the building had originally faced the bay, but the entrance was moved to the east side of the building when Wheeler Hall was built right up against it in 1918. Apparently John Galen Howard, the campus architect at the time, had it in for South Hall and had intended to demolish it. It escaped demolition at Howard’s hands, and later narrowly escaped burning down in 1934, when a careless painter’s blowtorch ignited the vines on the walls, and being torn down in 1967, when one administrator referred to it as a “crummy old building;” unfortunately it did not escape the addition of an ugly annex in 1913 or interior renovation in1968, in which the large rooms on the second and third floors were partitioned (several now have only half a window, and in some cases are taller than they are long or wide). Only the central staircase and wainscoting are original. The ivy that covered the building until a few years ago had been planted around the turn of the century by the 17 women of the class of 1874, the first women to graduate from Berkeley. More information on this building and its history, including some lovely historic photos (check out Blue and Gold) can be found on the School of Information Management and Systems site. Unfortunately, this page doesn’t describe Dr. Braunstein’s story of the Phantom Typist, his exhaustive comparison of the roof of South Hall and the scene of the chimney sweeps’ dance in “Mary Poppins,” or his discovery that South Hall appears in the novel Murder on the Air.

North Hall was a four story wood building similar in style to South Hall, originally white but soon painted brown with white trim, with two entrances and sets of steps in the front. I’ve heard that this building was named after Arthur W. North, class of 1895, explorer of the Canadian bush, journalist, and track star, but has he had not yet been born when the building was built, this is unlikely. North Hall housed the administrative offices of University Presidents from Gilman to Wheeler, the ASUC store (known as the Joint), the women’s club, and University publications. It was the center of student life; the Glee Club sang on the front steps, and senior men congregated on the southeast steps, near the Senior Men’s Bench, to discuss pressing issues of the day.

The building was condemned in 1914 as a “fire hazard” to the new Doe Library next door. It was ceremonially destroyed on May 16, 1917, the only campus building to be demolished in a respectful manner. The roofed-over basement which remained was used as the ASUC store until 1923; it was then used as emergency classrooms and the Naval Unit Headquarters until 1931 when it was finally filled in. The only reminder of North Hall now is a plaque on the south steps of Doe Library.

North Hall did not disappear immediately from campus life, however. As late as 1941, all the gavels used on campus were made from its banisters. Its bell, installed in 1873 and removed after Bacon Hall was built, was lost sometime between 1910 and 1922. After looking everywhere, including the Stanford campus, someone finally found it in the zoology vertebrate museum (I’d hate to think who classified it). Students used to try to steal its clapper every year, including those well known juvenile delinquents Robert Gordon Sproul and Joseph LeConte.

North and South Halls were sited on a plan designed by Frederick Law Olmstead (who had also designed New York’s Central Park and our own Golden Gate Park) when the College of California first obtained the Berkeley site in 1864. Olmstead described the site as “empty scenery and no view,” and envisioned an idyllic, park-likesetting for scholarly contemplation, far from Oakland or San Francisco. (Remember, this whole area was little more than wilderness until well after the turn of the century. The first University librarian recalled looking out the window of Bacon Hall and seeing only two white farmhouses in the distance. Berkeley did not even exist as a city until 1878. The Claremont Hotel, built in 1915, was a rural resort.)The campus was to be oriented toward the ocean and the Golden Gate (the bridge across which would not be built for another 73 years).

The major drawback of Olmstead’s plan was that it only had two buildings. With the addition of a third, Bacon Hall, a new plan was needed. In 1870 the Regents commissioned a plan from San Francisco architect David Farquarson who, in order to provide for the indefinite future needs of a growing university, magnanimously envisioned six buildings. His plan created a long axis starting from the central court (where the Campanile is now) and stretching southwest. He designed North and South Halls to suit this plan. An 1875 watershed map shows sites for North, South and Bacon Halls and dorms near Allston Street. A museum (where Cory Hall is now), School of Mines (near the engineering complex), Conservatory (where the agricultural complex is now), nursery (where Haviland Hall is now), horticulture building (where Hilgard Hall is now), Assembly Hall (where Dwinelle Hall is now) and an unspecified building (near where Stanley Hall is now) were all proposed.

Bacon Hall was completed in 1881 and stood where Birge Hall is now. Henry Douglas Bacon, a banker and investor from St. Louis, donated his library and art collection to the University as well as $25,000 toward a building in which to house them. Bacon was an abolitionist and admirer of Abraham Lincoln. He commissioned a marble statue entitled “The Abolition of Slavery,” a life sized Columbia standing over a nude slave girl, as a gift for the President; when Lincoln was assassinated the statue ended up here. Its last known whereabouts was the basement of Hearst Gym. One wonders how well Bacon got along with the many ex-Confederates at Berkeley, including University President John LeConte.

Bacon’s art collection occupied the top floor of the new building under a glass ceiling. The library below was very elegant, with easy chairs, glassed-in cases, and lovely curving ironwork balconies. After the library was moved to Doe Library in 1912, geology, paleontology and geography moved into the building, and the art gallery became a rock collection. Geography moved out in 1921; paleontology moved to the Hearst Mining building in the mid-1930s. The clock tower was removed in 1929 when the Regents grew concerned that it might fall through the glass ceiling in an earthquake, and the building was finally demolished in 1964. The clock mechanism, originally donated by a Regent, later became part of the clockwork in the Campanile.

For more than a decade I believed that the cupola in the courtyard of the chemistry complex had been part of Bacon Hall. It hadn’t — it’s a piece of the old Chemistry Building, an enormous college-Gothic structure built in 1891 and demolished in 1959. The cupola, which stands where the building once stood, commemorates the famous scientists who had worked under it. It has recently been repainted, reglassed, and labeled so that future students won’t make the same mistake I did.

Olmstead was not pleased with the university’s new look. Obviously not considering Berkeley one of his successes, he went on to design Stanford. In a letter to Leland Stanford in 1886 he said, “One of the largest of the college buildings at Amherst…has been lately taken down, as an offense to good taste… the same experience will, probably, by and by occur at Berkeley on a larger scale.” In 1887 he referred to the five academic buildings — North, South, and Bacon Halls, Harmon Gym (not the one we know now, but a small, beautiful octagonal carpenter Gothic structure with rose windows over the doors, which stood where Dwinelle Plaza is now and served as auditorium and theater as well as gym), Mechanical Arts (similar to North and South Halls in style, but tall and skinny, of dark brick with white details) and eight dormitory cottages along Strawberry Creek — as “cheap and nasty.”

The 1890s saw a construction boom, starting with the Chemistry Building in 1891. Mining and Civil Engineering, where Davis Hall is now, was built in 1893, and the Conservatory, a duplicate of the one in Golden Gate Park, in 1894 (this structure, southeast of where Haviland Hall is now, was torn down in 1924, when the botanical gardens were moved to Strawberry Canyon). In 1895 Budd Hall, named after Governor James H. Budd, one of the Twelve Apostles, was constructed where Moses Hall is now, on the foundation of the first Agriculture Building, which had been built in 1888 and later burned down. Budd Hall was designed for agriculture, but also housed physics, biochemistry, and viticulture (the University had a wine cellar here until 1918). It was a red brick and wood building, soon covered, appropriately, with vines. It was finally demolished in 1933, displacing its sole remaining occupant, an engineer named E.H. Hoff, who had been there since 1908, and UC Davis now houses the University’s viticulture department. There was, incidentally, an East Hall, built for zoology in 1898, where LeConte Hall is now. It was moved to the site of Morrison Hall in1921, and demolished in 1942, after zoology had moved to LSB.

By the turn of the century, with ten major buildings the campus had again outgrown its plan. In the 1890s a few began to whisper that the University of California was not as attractive as that new university across the Bay, and an ordered, gracious environment like the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exhibition’s “White City” was every American’s dream. Bernard Maybeck, at the time a drawing instructor, pointed out the need for a new plan to Regent Jacob B. Reinstein, an Apostle. He explained the situation to Phoebe Apperson Hearst, who agreed to put up $100,000 towards an international competition for the University’s first Comprehensive Building Plan in 1900, “one of the most lavish competitions in the history of architecture,” according to Bernard Maybeck’s daughter in law Jacomena.

The rules of the competition exhorted the entrants to ignore existing buildings and start over. They called for 28 buildings, including dormitories for 1,500 men and women; a list of the buildings including required sizes and capacities was provided. Olmstead had envisioned a sort of organic process in which each college grew naturally and separately, and the buildings did not relate to each other; in contrast to this, the competition specifically directed designers to view the University as a whole and plan for decades (if not centuries) into the future.

The 98 entries were evaluated by Reinstein and four architects from London, Paris, Dresden, and New York. In Antwerp the 98 were narrowed down to 11 entries from Europe and New York, more detailed and improved versions of which were exhibited in the Ferry Building in San Francisco. Each designer emphasized different aspects of campus life — dorms, arenas, classrooms and open space were given different priorities in different plans. The first six winners were neoclassical; it is not until the seventh place plan that such romantic conceits as woods and winding paths appear. The first six entries disregarded the fact that the site is a valley — all but one (in which the central campus was left natural and open) involved levelling the site. The difference between the higher-ranking plans and the others is the presence of an east-west axis. The lower-rated plans included north-south axes, and often had no east-west axis. The third place plan was fan-shaped, with the point at the west gate. Its buildings were long and skinny and oriented north to south, as well as cupped around the site. The fourth place plan, prepared by John Galen Howard, who was eventually hired as Supervising Architect, arranged dorms on Charter Hill like rays around a central stair (he later aligned them along a curving road; the idea of reserving the hill for dorms was one of the best that came out of the competition, and it is a shame we did not act on it).

The $10,000 first prize and the job of Supervising Architect went to Henri Jean Emile Benard of Paris. His plan was distinguished from the others in that his east-west axis included a square, treelined esplanade and formal garden, instead of a long boring axis with buildings set at monotonous intervals along it. His plan contained many different sizes and shapes of buildings, with domes, courts, towers and different roof styles, instead of rows of buildings of the same size and shape. His plan made elegant use of Charter Hill, with stairs and buildings working their way up to a monument at the top. Moreover, unlike most of the other plans, and unlike the campus today, it afforded a view of the hill from strategic points in the central campus. Like the other plans, Benard favored a formal instead of topographical layout. He and Howard both left the southwest corner of the site (where Harmon Gym, Evans Field and Edwards Stadium are today) as forest.

Benard visited Berkeley to collect his money and put the finishing touches on his masterpiece; his “difficult personality,” lack of English, and disappointment at the probable outcome of his grand plan (it would have cost $80 million — the Regents had less than $1 million to spend) were probably why he declined the job of Supervising Architect and proceeded to Mexico City, where he spent the next ten years before returning to France and thus dropping out of our history.

The Regents then decided to hire the fourth place winner, John Galen Howard of New York. Howard was an Easterner, born in Massachusetts and educated at MIT. After working for H.H. Richardson and McKim, Mead and White, he obtained an architecture degree from the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and at the time of the competition had been a partner in Howard and Cauldwell of New York for about five years. His plan was similar to Benard’s, though more rigid and less inspired. It was greeted with such epithets as “pretentious” and “un-American,” but turned out far better than we had any reason to expect.

Showing a fitting sense of priorities, the first structure begun under the new plan, and the only Benard building erected on campus, was University House, started in 1900 but not finished until 1907 and not occupied until Benjamin Ide Wheeler moved in in 1911. The supervising architect was Albert Pissis (who also designed San Francisco’s Emporium Building and the well-known San Francisco Mechanics Institute built in 1909);Howard did the interiors. Chancellors resided there until 1958, when Clark Kerr broke with tradition by staying in his house in El Cerrito. Chancellor Chang-Ling Tien and his wife currently occupy the house. This building was the first to step over the boundaries of the original campus between the forks of Strawberry Creek.

The Greek Theater was the first Howard building to be completed (at least, as much as it ever was — Howard had originally planned a ring of karyatids around the structure, which was to have been faced in marble). The site, known as Ben Weed’s Amphitheater after the student who discovered its acoustic properties, had been used for performances “in the rough” for at least 20 years. Howard’s model was the theater at Epidaurus, with few Roman elements thrown in. Its opening was celebrated with a performance of Aristophanes’ The Birds, in Greek. The first two rows of seats in the theater have “Hearst” written on the back — they are reserved for the family.

Although the Regents had declared Benard’s plan “permanent” in 1900,Howard merrily altered it to suit himself. His changes allowed for less excavation and embankment, and more work with the natural contours of the site. He rearranged the formal east-west axis to slant toward the Golden Gate and the existing street plan of Berkeley, and deleted several of Benard’s street links (especially to Telegraph, which was originally to have bisected the campus) because he felt that the University should be more isolated. In 1908 Howard officially submitted a revised plan, which became known as the Phoebe Hearst Plan. Under this plan, with Howard as Supervising Architect, the classical core of the campus took shape.

The memorial to Howard before the entrance of the Campanile lists his work: the Greek Theater, Hearst Mining, Doe Library, Boalt Hall (now Durant), Agricultural Hall (now Wellman), Sather Tower and the Esplanade, Hilgard Hall, Wheeler Hall, Gilman Hall, Stephens Hall, Haviland Hall, LeConte Hall, Hesse Hall. He also built vernacular structures of wood, like Naval Architecture (formerly the Drawing Office) and NorthGate Hall (formerly “The Ark”; Howard, as Supervising Architect, was “Father Noah”). I had heard that these buildings were “temporaries,” but Paul Brentano of the history department says they were built of wood to represent connections to the community beyond the University, a concern spurred by the city’s rapid growth. Although in a 1914 plan building were oriented toward the interior rather than the periphery of the campus, in the late 1910s Howard began to acknowledge the city. Hilgard Hall (1918), for example, attempted to face both inward and outward at once.

When Phoebe Hearst died and President Wheeler retired in 1919, Howard found himself dealing directly with the Regents. He had always insisted on complete control of campus design, as well as the sole right to design campus buildings; this the Regents were no longer willing to grant him. In 1922 they awarded the design of the new Hearst Gym to Bernard Maybeck and Julia Morgan while Howard was in Europe. This building, and the attached buildings and grounds originally planned, were the seed of a “revolt” organized by Bernard Maybeck, Julia Morgan and William Randolph Hearst, whose memorial gym for his mother had originally been intended as the nucleus of a “countercampus” in the style of San Simeon. Unfortunately the Depression intervened and these plans were never realized.

The deciding battle, however, was over the location of Memorial Stadium, built in 1923 at the head of Strawberry Canyon in a bird and wildflower sanctuary. Strawberry Creek was rerouted and piped under the stadium, and fill for levelling was dug from the side of Charter Hill (today, after further desecration, known as Cyclotron Hill).Howard thought this loss to the campus environment would be too great, preferring the site where Evans Field was eventually built in 1930, but he was overruled. By1923, after several veiled threats and offers to resign his contract as Supervising Architect was not renewed and he retired from his position as Dean of the Architecture School.

The Regents then hired George Kelham as Supervising Architect; he served from1927 to 1936. He had impeccable Beaux Arts credentials, having designed the San Francisco Public Library in 1916 and the original Bank of America Building in San Francisco (across the street from the current “Bank of America Building” which no longer houses the headquarters of the B of A). Under his direction Harmon Gym and Moses, McLaughlin, Bowles and Gianini Halls were built (he designed all but the last, which was done by William C. Hays) as well as LSB — at three acres, the world’s largest academic structure when built. The ornamentation on this building is similar to the shells on his Shell Building, 100 Bush Street in San Francisco, which he designed in 1929. Kelham also designed International House, built in 1930.

Arthur Brown, Jr. became Supervising Architect in 1938. He was an excellent choice, with many fine buildings in the City to his credit — Temple Emanu-El, City Hall (1915), the Opera House (1932), Coit Tower (1934), and the glorious Transbay Transit Terminal (1937). During the austere Depression and war years, he tried to maintain the “Howard look” but the University just couldn’t afford it; thus such halfhearted efforts as Sproul, Lewis, and Minor Halls and the Bancroft Library. He devised a new plan in 1944 which created, among other things, a minor north-south axis around Hearst Mining and called for a four-story limit on campus structures (to keep from building all over the available space he planned a series of long, low structures around the campus perimeter). He resigned in 1948, probably over his design for Stanford’s Hoover Tower in 1941.

After World War II the population of California exploded and, thanks to the GI Bill, so did enrollment — to 47,000 students by 1958, a figure that was then expected to triple by 1978. Construction bonds were passed in 1956, 1958, 1962 and 1964. After a temporary stint with the Office of Architects and Engineers, the Regents, apparently giving up on Supervising Architects, formed the Committee on Campus Planning in 1955. This committee consists of 20 to 25 people appointed by the Chancellor — faculty, students and representatives of other campus communities. In 1956 this committee unveiled the first Long Range Development Plan, which stated among other things that only 25% of the campus area could be built on and that cars would be considered the “principal means of access” to campus. Under this plan academic buildings would be built at the campus center and support services on the perimeter, and buildings would be arranged in disciplinary “complexes;” neither of these provisions lasted long after Tolman Hall, a building housing psychology and education classrooms, was built in 1962 in the northwest corner of campus in the bioscience area.

Many old buildings were demolished during this period, and many important spaces, like Observatory Hill and Central Glade, were built over. A new Long Range Development Plan was released in 1962 — it was more sensitive to the campus environment, acknowledged alternative means of transportation, included landscaping work, and considered outlying areas such as Cyclotron Hill as well as the central campus. It did not, however, represent a major philosophical change. Clark Kerr (class of ’39), then Chancellor, published his famous “multiversity” essay in 1963, which justified the breakup of the university into separate worlds with no community or connection. It also implicitly justified the different “functional” buildings of the ’50s and ’60s, monster blocks with rows and rows of doors leading to isolated rooms. The very next year Wurster Hall, the epitome of anomie, as it were, was completed.

This sort of thing could not be stood for long without some kind of reaction. In 1965 Allan Temko, a member of the Center for Planning and Development Research, criticized the fortresslike aspect of the southeast gate — Boalt, Kroeber and Wurster Halls. In 1967 the Commission on University Governance released a paper on the University’s building plan, criticizing the University for its lack of imagination in dealing with student housing, its favoritism toward hard science, its inability to foster community, and the its unwillingness to hold the planning department accountable for its decisions. The report stressed the importance of the campus environment and its powerful effect on the quality of education the University provides.

Confrontations in the mid-1970s broke out over the slated destruction of the Senior Men’s Club and the Naval Architecture building. The Senior Men’s Club, formerly Golden Bear Lodge, and now officially called Senior Hall, was the first campus building to be built with student donations. It was scheduled for dismantling and storage in 1973 in order to expand the Men’s Faculty Club, but the Friends of Senior Men’s Hall, and their lawyer, were able to stop the demolition because an environmental impact document had not been prepared. Naval Architecture, one of Howard’s wood buildings, built in 1914 and partly demolished in 1967 to make room for the Davis Hall annex, was left in peace in 1976 after a battle over the siting of the Bechtel Engineering Center, and placed on the National Register of Historic Landmarks in 1977.

The Campus Planning Study Group’s survey of historic resources in 1978 nominated historic buildings and spaces for the National Register; many were placed on the Register in 1982. Using the results of the survey, design studies were prepared in 1979 to propose ways to enhance and protect the campus environment. The 1970s and ’80s were relatively slow years for campus construction, as most of the University’s growth in these years took place off the original campus.

The 1962 Master Plan was finally replaced in 1989 with a plan that purports to be concerned with the campus environment, historic preservation, and open space. Although the plan calls for a reduction in campus enrollment and includes restoration of Wellman Court and what’s left of Central Glade (which includes both the Doe Extension and a new Student Services Center), it also includes additions to most of the buildings on the southeast campus. New laws ensure public review and comment, as well as sensitivity to environmental and community issues. Despite this new sensitivity, several new buildings have been erected in the past few years, including RSF, LSB Annex, and the Northwest Animal Facility. While they are of higher quality than most of the buildings built after World War II, they are intrusive and use up valuable open space.