Stanford and UC Berkeley campus designs
Both campuses were the product of two powerful women, Jane Stanford and Phoebe Apperson Hearst who sponsored the designs for the two campuses. Jane Stanford as a memorial for her son Leland Stanford Junior, who died aged 15 of typhoid, and Phoebe Hearst who sponsored the international competition to design the Berkeley campus as a symbol of California’s emergence on the world stage as an economic powerhouse.
The campus is organized around two major axes and formal quadrangles. All buildings have red tiled roofs and are clad in either sandstone or matching stucco.
The Main Quad is the central focal point of the campus. The Chapel is on axis while the surrounding pavilions and their service areas are linked by arcades.
The Science Quad built since 2000 adheres to the original plan extending the east/west cross axis. All the new buildings have red tiled roofs and define the figurative space of the quad.
The International Competition was organized by Bernard Maybeck inviting architects from the US and Europe to enter. It was judged by
Benard had never visited the site before submitting his entry so was unaware of the topography as seen in this rendering.
Emil Benard managed to offend the University officials and was fired, being replaced by John Galen Howard, 4th Prize winner. Howard reorganized Benard’s plan and went on to be Campus Architect under Chancellor Benjamin Wheeler and built 21 buildings on the site.
The campus plan evolved from the few original buildings that preceded the Competition, which established the Campanile Axis aligned with the Golden Gate. The Main Axis was established parallel to this leading from the Mining Circle westwards down the Central Glade. That axis was violated after WW2 by the erection of multiple temporary buildings and permanently wrecked by the construction of Evans Hall and the Moffat Library.
The role of Campus Architect, held by Beaux-Arts trained John Galen Howard, George Kelham, and Arthur Brown was replaced by a series of Long Range Development Plans.
The 1951 plan stated: "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”.
The campus plan is a combination of axial Beaux-Arts classicism and Arts and Crafts inspired romanticism.
The two major axes are the primary organizing elements of the campus plan. One is formal, the other is informal.
The blue circles mark the buildings Evans Hall and the Moffat Library that violated the Central Axis.
The Central Glade has evolved from a formal vista on axis towards the Golden Gate to a more informal sequence of spaces with both the introduction of new buildings and the growth of the eucalyptus groves.
One of the first buildings on the campus, designed by Robert Farquharson in a French Second Empire Style. Its twin North Hall was replaced by Arthur Brown’s Bancroft Library. Both buildings established the axial relationship towards the Golden Gate.
Julia Morgan was architect and civil engineer for this building. It was opened in 1904 by President Theodore Roosevelt. At the ceremony John Galen Howard boasted to Roosevelt that it was designed by a woman, and because of that he only had to pay her half what his male employees would get. On hearing this Julia Morgan resigned and with support from Phoebe Hearst set up her own practice, and in turn hired some of Howard’s best staff to be her employees.
John Galen Howard’s most sophisticated building, designed in French Neoclassical splendor.
The Campanile (left) and University Library (right) by John Galen Howard, and between them Arthur Brown’s Bancroft Library.
Opposite the University Library is the Asian Library by Todd Williams Billie Tsien that in an abstract way attempts to relate to the original Beaux-Arts inspired campus plan.
Dan Solomon and I were hired in 1995 by the University to prepare plans for the NE Quadrant. Our plan restored the ideas behind the Howard Plan reestablishing the Main Axis. We proposed replacing Evans Hall, which might become a reality by 2030.
The latest Long Rage Development Plan by Sasaki Associates 2022.
