Founding father: 1925 portrait of Walter Ratcliff Jr., who became California’s 331st licensed architect one month before the 1906 earthquake. RATCLIFF ARCHIVES AND GRAPHICS

As a young Cal graduate Walter Ratcliff Jr. first left his mark on the Berkeley campus 102 years ago. Apprenticing to campus designer John Galen Howard, he wore a gold pocket watch to celebrate his first job site, which happened to be a huge hole in the ground that would become the Hearst Memorial Mining Building. Concrete was being poured, ton after ton of it. This was a dramatic moment. As the excited Ratcliff leaned hard over the hole to witness the event, the watch fell from his vest and into the wet mass 40 feet below. There it remains in the foundation of one of the University’s landmarks.

Today, more than a dozen major campus structures are products of a Ratcliff design. Around the Bay Area, numerous landmarks, including Mills College and Terminal 2 of the Oakland Airport, as well as dozens of prominent Berkeley buildings, are Ratcliff conceptions. The legacy is three generations old and the Ratcliff firm, now 80 strong and headed by Kit Ratcliff ’68, Walter’s grandson, is celebrating its centennial this year.

Ironically one of the firm’s freshest designs is a new interior for the Doe Annex, the home of the Bancroft Library, also celebrating its centennial this year. The Annex stands adjacent to the Doe Library which houses the Morrison Library, Walter Ratcliff’s first campus commission.

Atrium stairway of the renovated Valley Life Sciences Building.

Morrison Library is located in Cal’s Doe Memorial Library.