Campus of the University of California, Berkeley

Recent decades have seen additions including the postmodernist Haas School of Business by Charles Willard Moore, Soda Hall by Edward Larrabee Barnes, and the East Asian Library by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects.

Even in stormy weather, there is great grandeur in the movements of the clouds rolling over their sombre slopes and declivities, and I remember a single scene of this kind as one of the most impressive I have ever witnessed.

[3]: 11  Olmsted's design followed the City Beautiful movement and was sensitive to the natural topography, including Strawberry Creek, which ran through the site, and proposed an east–west axis aligned with the Golden Gate.

[3]: 11 [4] If Olmsted's plan had been implemented, the campus would consist of student villages for living and learning, linked by meandering paths and surrounded by parks.

[3]: 12–13  Shortly after Daniel Coit Gilman was named the president of the University of California in 1872, William Hammond Hall wrote to Samuel F. Butterworth, a regent, and proposed to design the campus without remuneration for his services.

[3]: 34  Very little of these early University of California campus design implementations (c. 1868–1903) remain, with the Victorian Second Empire-style South Hall (1873, Kenitzer and Farquharson) and Piedmont Avenue (Olmsted) being notable exceptions.

Although Émile Bénard, a Frenchman, won the competition, he disliked the "uncultured" San Francisco atmosphere and refused to personally revise the plan to the site.

[4] For the first half of the 20th century, Berkeley campus architecture was led by a series of three notable Bay Area architects famed for their work in San Francisco: John Galen Howard (1901–1924), George W. Kelham (1927–1936), and Arthur Brown, Jr. (1938–1948).

[8]: 65–66  This divided the campus into four pieces: the park-like west side, as a buffer to the city of Berkeley; the central core, with its monumental buildings; the hilly east, "a majestic natural background and climax to the composition"; and the south, given to athletic pursuits.

946)[9] and also are listed individually in the National Register of Historic Places: John Galen Howard retired in 1924,[8]: 167  his support base gone with both Phoebe Hearst's death and President Wheeler's resignation in 1919.

William Randolph Hearst, seeking to memorialize his mother, contributed to Howard's resignation by commissioning Bernard Maybeck and Julia Morgan to design a series of dramatic buildings on the southern part of the campus.

These were originally to include a huge domed auditorium, a museum, an art school, and a women's gymnasium, all arranged on an eastward esplanade and classically oriented towards the campanile.

From 1927 until his death in 1936, George W. Kelham was supervising architect for the campus; Kelham previously had arrived on the West Coast in the wake of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire and remained there to design notable replacement buildings, including the San Francisco Public Library that was integrated into Howard's Beaux-Arts design for the city government complex at Civic Center.

[29]: 20 During his tenure, Kelham never prepared an overall campus plan update, which fell instead on Warren C. Perry, who had succeeded Howard as the head of the School of Architecture.

[29]: 168 Two mosaic murals by Helen Bell Bruton (Sculpture and Dance) and Florence Alston Swift (Music and Painting) were commissioned by the Works Progress Administration and installed in 1936 on the Old Art Gallery,[30] which originally served as a small utility building designed by Howard and completed in 1904.

[29]: 23  The final version of the 1944 plan reduced open spaces on campus to a minimum, as maintaining the Beaux-Arts precedents using low, sprawling buildings in the constrained site was inadequate to handle the forecasted explosive growth in enrollment, and he resigned his post in 1948.

Under the direction of chief architect Robert J. Evans, the office produced a Campus Plan Study in 1951, departing from the Beaux-Arts designs championed over the past fifty years: "blindly following policies and concepts of monumentality unsuited to contemporary requirements ... would straight-jacket a live and vital University into inflexible buildings [and] deprive it of its open spaces, its natural beauty and its true monumentality.

"[29]: 25  Instead, heights would be governed by coverage (not to exceed twenty to thirty percent) and materials selection should be responsive to "the organic requirements of the occupants and ... create maximum practical internal flexibility".

[29]: 24–26 One of the first new developments in the postwar era was Cory Hall, which houses the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science in the northeast corner of campus.

[33][34] A new building for the School of Law designed by Warren Charles Perry was dedicated in 1951,[35] in the southeastern corner of campus at the intersection of Piedmont Avenue and Bancroft Way.

[38] A four-story expansion, designed by Wurster, Bernardi, & Emmons,[39] was initiated in 1959, by Boalt Hall alumni who helped raise funds for building the Earl Warren Legal Center.

Wurster championed the development of high-rise buildings to ensure that open spaces could be preserved, codifying the 25% coverage ratio, which also would "restore the campus to its old sculptural form.

"[29]: 26  He also retained Brown's shortened main axis and first proposed the development of what would become Memorial Glade, north of Doe Library; in the immediate aftermath of the war, that space was occupied by temporary buildings.

[49] The original Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union building, owned by the ASUC Auxiliary, was constructed with funds gained from the sale of the Cal sports teams to the university in 1959.

The building's ground-floor “structures bay” rises two stories, providing space for testing many types of materials and designs, from scale models of California highway overpasses to segments of the Golden Gate Bridge.

It blocked the central axis and cast a tall shadow over the adjacent Hearst Memorial Mining Building, leading the former committee chairman Donald H. McLaughlin to remark that it had become "painfully intrusive".

In 1970, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive opened on Bancroft Way across from the Hearst Gymnasium in a building designed by Mario J. Ciampi.

[citation needed] It was designed by the New York architect Edward Larrabee Barnes[66] with the local firm Allen and Anshen and completed in August 1994 at the cost of $35.5 million, raised entirely from private gifts.

It houses the headquarters of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) and serves as a center for interdisciplinary teaching and research as part of the campus Health Sciences Initiative.

Davis Hall, primarily the location of the Civil Engineering Department, will be expanded to serve as the headquarters for the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS).