On a recent afternoon, I stood with Wendy Hillis, Cal’s campus architect, squinting up at Evans Hall, a ten-story block of reinforced concrete that looms over the Hearst Mining Circle near the northeast corner of campus. Cold and utilitarian on the outside, cramped and dark on the inside, Evans Hall is almost certainly Cal’s most hated building.
Hillis gestured to the greenish monolith and said, “Ultimately my goal is to not have something like this happen on my watch.”
“So you think this building was a mistake?” I asked.
“Yes.”
But as Hillis then explained, sheer ugliness is not the building’s worst offense. Placement is. The Hearst Mining Circle was designed by the university’s founding architect, John Galen Howard, to be the apex of a spacious central greenway stretching up from the western edge of campus. Howard oriented campus slightly askew of the City of Berkeley’s street grid to face the then-bridgeless Golden Gate. For 57 years, the Mining Circle offered an unobstructed view of that symbol of America’s westward progress.
Today, it offers a view of Evans Hall.
Completed in 1971 on the west side of the circle, the brutalist high-rise casts a long shadow—literally and figuratively—over what is arguably Howard’s masterpiece, the Hearst Memorial Mining Building, an elegant blend of Beaux-Arts and homegrown Californian styles. Evans Hall was disliked from day one, sparking acts of protest and even lectures on “Fascism and Architecture.” The proximity of these two buildings, one loved, the other loathed, makes for a jarring juxtaposition, one that highlights the central challenge of Hillis’s job: how to meet the needs of an ever-expanding, ever-modernizing campus while maintaining university-wide architectural harmony.
“Institutions rarely lose coherence all at once,” she wrote to me. “They lose it incrementally … when each project is optimized individually … but no one is consistently evaluating the cumulative impact on the whole campus.”
Founding architect John Galen Howard set the campus axis slightly askew of the city grid for a direct view to the then-bridgeless Golden Gate. (UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design Archives)
By default, everything we build now is modern in some way…. So how do we make modern contextual?
That wide-angle view is precisely what the campus architect is for. (Unlike Howard, today’s campus architects don’t design, they direct.) Hillis previously served as the historic preservation architect at UNC Chapel Hill and later as Tulane’s university architect. She took the job at Cal, where she is also assistant vice chancellor, in 2019, and has been busy ever since, presiding over an especially active period of campus construction. Alumni who haven’t visited campus in a while will be struck by the many changes.
There are transformative renovations, like the conversion of Dwinelle Annex, a Howard building, into a new home for the Disabled Students’ Program called the Creekside Center. There is brand-new construction, from the Undergraduate Academic Building, the first on campus made from eco-friendly engineered wood, to The Gateway, the massive, visually arresting headquarters of the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society. There are also dorms galore, like the Helen Diller Anchor House, the deluxe new home on Oxford Street for transfer students, and the Judith E. Heumann House, the People’s Park conversion opening in fall 2027. Cal recently announced a two-year housing guarantee for all incoming freshmen starting this fall.
Hillis’s job is to ensure that all this new construction exists in visual and spatial harmony with existing structures built in an array of eras and styles, some of them more than a century old. To thread that needle, Hillis looks forward and back—favoring modern designs and materials, but with deference toward Howard’s original campus vision.
“We’ve always been responding to [Howard’s] plan in a lot of ways,” she said. “Sometimes we completely disregarded the plan, like in the placement of Evans Hall. But in our current master plan, we’re really coming back to those precepts. Because it really is this great organizing language for campus.”
By the 1890s, a few decades after the university had moved to its permanent home in Berkeley, anxiety was growing among the regents and funders that the physical campus, consisting of a smattering of relatively disorganized buildings, was not up to snuff. It didn’t help that a new private university across the bay was attracting architectural accolades for its tightly cohesive and grand California Mission Revival design. Cal looked downright shabby by comparison.
An international architecture contest was devised, funded by philanthropist Phoebe Apperson Hearst, widow of mining magnate George Hearst, in hopes of procuring a comprehensive campus design. The prospectus, likely written by architect and then-drafting instructor Bernard Maybeck, promised the winner the prize of a lifetime: limitless money and unrestrained creative freedom to design and build “a City of Learning … which will never need to be structurally changed in all the future history of the University.”
“The architect who can seize the opportunity,” the prospectus assured, “will immortalize himself.”
The campus’s newest master plan envisions a green space atop a sleek ground-level structure where Evans Hall now stands. (UC Berkeley Capital Strategies)
John Galen Howard’s design placed fourth. It’s a long story, but suffice to say that after a convoluted and drama-filled process, the first-place winner was given the boot, and Howard landed the job.
Over the next three decades, Howard was prolific. He would design and build at least 30 campus buildings, the most notable of them in monumental Beaux-Arts style, with stately features like white granite facades, columns, statues, bas relief ornamentation, and terracotta tiled roofs. Many of them still stand, making up what is now known as the classical core of campus: buildings like Wheeler Hall, the Campanile, California Hall, and Doe Library.
Finally, the University of California had a majestic physical campus to match its grand intellectual ambitions to be the “Athens of the West.”
“I get this question from students,” Hillis said as we stood admiring the Hearst Memorial Mining Building. “We have these beautiful classical buildings on campus. Why don’t we build like that anymore?”
It would certainly solve the coherence issue. But as Hillis explained, we don’t because we can’t. It would be far too expensive in both materials and labor. Even if you could find the artisans capable of such ornate architecture, custom sculptures and grand lobbies are hard to justify in an era of tight budgets and high tuition.
“By default, everything we build now is modern in some way,” she says. “But of course we have to look at the context. So how do we make modern contextual?”
This inevitable contrast between old and new makes designing new campus buildings challenging, says John King ’80, a retired urban design critic for the San Francisco Chronicle who now serves on an advisory committee that assists Hillis’s office with design decisions. “It’s important to respect and appreciate and learn from the classical legacy of the campus, the layout of the campus, all the historic and environmental elements there,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean mimic the past … because that can be very clumsy.”
Hillis pointed up to the roof of Campbell Hall, opposite the Mining Building—a white, boxy edifice originally constructed in 1959 and topped with what became known locally as a McLaughlin Hat after the regent who promoted its use. It refers to terracotta tile roofing plunked onto otherwise plain buildings as a nod to the neoclassical structures around them.
Though Hillis appreciates the intention behind such referential elements, the risk, she said, is pastiche. Or even, as some past architecture critics have charged, caricature. She then pointed to the top of Evans Hall, where the very tops of the pilasters are painted an earthy pink intended to reference the classic terracotta tiles. “It makes me laugh because that does not make it contextual at all,” she said. “It’s like a little lipstick.”
Campbell Hall with its dubious “hat” went up in the midst of a development boom following World War II. A tidal wave of students and research funding meant an urgent need for more classrooms, offices, and housing. This ushered in what Berkeley art history Professor Margaretta Lovell calls “the disciplinary silos” phase, during which Howard’s emphasis on uninterrupted open spaces and axial symmetry was discarded in favor of quadrangles of buildings grouped by discipline. Tall concrete giants popped up all over campus; temporary classrooms smothered Memorial Glade; and, in 1970, Moffitt Library became the first permanent structure to interrupt the flow of the central greenway, followed shortly by Evans Hall, the coup de grace to Howard’s vision.
“Evans did in the axis,” Lovell says. “It sits right smack in the middle of it. It’s a wholly different vision of what campus should be.”
By the time Hillis took the reins, Cal campus development had entered what Lovell calls the donut phase, “where you put a phalanx of tall, frankly aggressive, buildings around the edge, and you keep the center open as a kind of sanctuary.”
The Grimes Center, engineering’s new home. (UC Berkeley Capital Strategies)
The Undergraduate Academic Building. (UC Berkeley Capital Strategies)
Cal’s New Century Plan, published in the early aughts, included design guidance for any new construction in the classical core aimed at preserving a coherent look. It was a checklist with requirements like granite (or look-alike) facades, hip or gable roofs, and terracotta tiles.
“I blew those up,” Hillis said with a laugh.
Arguably, she did so out of necessity.
Lurking beneath any architectural decision at Cal is the presence of the Hayward Fault along the eastern edge of campus. Seismic concerns were front and center during Hillis’s first major project, an addition to the Bechtel Engineering Center on the northeast corner of Memorial Glade. The design called for building atop the original structure, but seismic realities clashed with the design guidance; the original structure simply couldn’t accept the weight of two new granite floors above.
The Gateway is decidedly futuristic. Its immediate neighbors are not.
Hillis describes The Gateway, which opens this summer, as a “rhombus that has two scoops taken out of it.”
Hillis and I stood on the sunny terrace of the Grimes Engineering Center, as the transformed building is now called. The ultimate design, of which Hillis is proud, features an ultra-lightweight structure, mostly glass outer walls, and, as she pointed out to me on the terrace, far-out-looking exposed supports called seismic fuses, designed to deform and dissipate the energy of an earthquake. Sleek and modern, the building stands out from many of its stately neighbors and the towering bulk of Evans next door.
“It’s very 21st century,” King says. “It’s how do we think about sustainability? How do we think of reuse of material? How do we think of seismic technology? At the same time, it’s a very contemporary building, but in a fascinating, elegant way.”
Although Evans Hall has had a target on its back for decades due to its architectural flaws, it was its profound seismic vulnerability that ultimately signed its death warrant. Seismic retrofitting had been explored as an alternative to demolition. That was the treatment the Hearst Memorial Mining Building received, at a cost of nearly $91 million. But for Evans Hall, the seismic weaknesses and other issues, including deferred maintenance, meant the most cost-effective approach would be wholesale replacement.
Next, Hillis and I strolled down Campanile Way, Howard’s secondary campus axis, to the recently completed Undergraduate Academic Building situated along the south fork of Strawberry Creek. The L-shaped building and adjacent 400-seat auditorium are designed to highlight the neighboring creekside redwood grove. The biggest controversy so far, she said, has been alums upset about a row of pink azaleas alongside the new building.
“They just don’t like that color?” I asked.
“It’s Stanford. How dare we.”
“But they’re pink.”
Hillis shrugged. She said the offending flowers will soon be replaced by bluish-purple rhododendrons.
But maybe this focus on flora is about more than just nitpicking alums. As Judy Chess, retired director of the campus’s Capital Projects team, explains, tension around Cal construction projects often involves green spaces as much as the buildings themselves.
“The campus is so bucolic that it’s very hard to reconcile the image that people have of it as a park with the need for it also to be a vital academic center that serves hundreds of thousands of people,” Chess says. “And so many of the changes and many of the decisions that get made in terms of how tall a building can be, where you can put a building, how much open space remains on the campus are framed in that conflict.”
But still, pink flowers?
By far the most ambitious new project stewarded by Hillis is The Gateway, home of Cal’s first new college in 50 years, the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society. Rivaled in size only by the massive Valley Life Sciences Building, The Gateway is decidedly futuristic. Its immediate neighbors are not.
“It’s like a rhombus that has two scoops taken out of it,” Hillis says. “The scoop on the back is an amphitheater that connects to the courtyard of the College of Natural Resources. When you see it from overhead, it naturally embraces the space adjacent to it, making a larger space out of it. That’s the kind of thing that really satisfies me.”
When The Gateway opens this summer, it will trigger a key step toward the long-wished-for demise of Evans Hall. The statistics department, subsumed by the new College of Computing, Data Science, and Society, will move from Evans into The Gateway. At the same time, the classrooms and advising offices in Evans, some of which have already begun relocating, will move into the new Undergraduate Academic Building. That will leave at least four floors of the building empty. But as with all construction projects on campus, the remaining challenge is one of math and economics; in this case, literally. The math and economics departments still need new homes before the building can be demolished. “I’ll be lucky if it’s five years from now,” Hillis said. “But it’s in the works.”
A notable element of Cal’s New Century Plan, released in the early 2000s, was a concept drawing for an Evans Hall replacement consisting of dual pavilions, short in stature and neoclassical in style, a clear nod to the surrounding structures of the classical core. However, the most recent Campus Master Plan includes an even bolder vision. The concept drawing depicts a ground-level structure built right into the sloping ground that rises from Memorial Glade to the Mining Circle. The roof is a landscaped green space. The view from the Mining Circle is restored.
But that won’t be the end of the story.
A long-running joke on campus is that UC stands for “under construction.” It’s true that the ever-shifting needs of the university, and the ever-shifting ground beneath it, ensure that change is a reliable constant around here. The risk, architecturally speaking, is what Hillis calls “incremental fragmentation,” the slow erosion of spatial legibility. Put another way, the design scheme starts to not make sense. That can be avoided, she says, “not by resisting change, but by ensuring change accumulates toward coherence rather than drift.”
Coby McDonald, M.J. ’17, is a freelance writer, podcast producer, and frequent contributor to California.
