[4] It was designed by John Galen Howard, with the assistance of architect and Berkeley alumna Julia Morgan and the Dean of the College of Mines at that time, Samuel B. Christy.

Howard feared that the scant number examples to study would make his design prone to the mistakes of an architectural form early in its evolution.

Vents and chimneys were also built independent of the shell, as these architectural features were expected to have shorter lifespans than the exterior structure.

According to Howard, the two male sculptures on the west signified "primal elements", and the two on the east "eternal forces", representative of the character of mining.

The two central female sculptures provided a balancing presence, representing "the ideal art, the final flower of life--fresh, mysterious, pure--emerging from the void of chaos".

They were designed by the Valencian architect Rafael Guastavino, who had immigrated to the United States in 1881, earning notability for his work in the Boston Public Library vaults in the 1890s.

The stature and mould of his life bespoke the pioneers who gave their strength to riskful search in the hard places of the earth.

In an interview with the University of California Magazine in 1902, 5 years before the building's dedication ceremony, Howard reflects: The aim has been to give expression to the character of a College of Mining Engineering as distinguished from one of Art, Letters, or of Natural Science.

Such a building as a library, for instance, may without inconsistency rejoice in all the sumptuous glories of Roman architecture or the Renaissance; the tradition of the world leads on naturally enough in this direction.

But ... such delicate and highly organized motives find little place in a Mining Building, which demands a treatment, while no less beautiful, much more primitive, less elaborately developed in the matter of detail, less influenced by the extreme classic tradition either as a canon of proportion or as an architectonic schema.

The profession of mining has to do with the very body and bone of the earth; its process is a ruthless assault upon the bowels of the world, a contest with the crudest and most rudimentary forces.