University of California, Berkeley
Monday, September 3rd, 2018 - 11:00 am (CET/MEZ) Berlin | Author/Destination: North America / NordamerikaCategory/Kategorie: Architecture, General, Universities, Colleges, Academies The University of California, Berkeley is a public research university in Berkeley, California. Founded in 1868, Berkeley is the flagship institution of the ten research universities affiliated with the University of California system. It is often ranked as a top-ten university in the world and the top public university in the United States. Established in 1868 as the University of California, resulting from the merger of the private College of California and the public Agricultural, Mining and Mechanical Arts College in Oakland, Berkeley offers approximately 350 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a wide range of disciplines. The Dwinelle Bill of March 5, 1868 (California Assembly Bill No. 583) stated that the “University shall have for its design, to provide instruction and thorough and complete education in all departments of science, literature and art, industrial and profession[al] pursuits, and general education, and also special courses of instruction in preparation for the professions”.
Berkeley is one of the 14 founding members of the Association of American Universities and continues to have very high research activity, with $789 million in R&D expenditures in the fiscal year ended June 30, 2015. Today, Berkeley maintains close relationships with three United States Department of Energy National Laboratories—Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory—and is home to many world-renowned research institutes, including the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and the Space Sciences Laboratory. Through its partner institution University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Berkeley also offers a joint medical program at the UCSF Medical Center, the top hospital in California.
As of March 2018, Berkeley alumni, faculty members and researchers include 104 Nobel laureates, 25 Turing Awards winners , and 13 Fields Medalists. They have also won 9 Wolf Prizes, 45 MacArthur Fellowships, 20 Academy Awards, 14 Pulitzer Prizes and 207 Olympic medals (117 gold, 51 silver and 39 bronze). In 1930, Nobel laureate Ernest Lawrence invented the cyclotron at Berkeley, based on which UC Berkeley researchers along with Berkeley Lab have discovered or co-discovered 16 chemical elements of the periodic table – more than any other university in the world. Lawrence Livermore Lab later continued to discover or co-discover six chemical elements (113 to 118). During the 1940s, Berkeley physicist J. R. Oppenheimer, the “Father of the Atomic Bomb”, led the Manhattan project to create the first atomic bomb. In the 1960s, Berkeley was particularly noted for the Free Speech Movement as well as the Anti-Vietnam War Movement led by its students. In the 21st century, Berkeley has become one of the leading universities in producing entrepreneurs and its alumni have founded a large number of companies worldwide.
What is considered the historic campus today was the result of the 1898 “International Competition for the Phoebe Hearst Architectural Plan for the University of California,” funded by William Randolph Hearst‘s mother and initially held in the Belgian city of Antwerp; eleven finalists were judged again in San Francisco in 1899. The winner was Frenchman Émile Bénard, however he refused to personally supervise the implementation of his plan and the task was subsequently given to architecture professor John Galen Howard. Howard designed over twenty buildings, which set the tone for the campus up until its expansion in the 1950s and 1960s. The structures forming the “classical core” of the campus were built in the Beaux-Arts Classical style, and include Hearst Greek Theatre, Hearst Memorial Mining Building, Doe Memorial Library, California Hall, Wheeler Hall, (Old) Le Conte Hall, Gilman Hall, Haviland Hall, Wellman Hall, Sather Gate, and the 307-foot (94 m) Sather Tower (nicknamed “the Campanile” after its architectural inspiration, St Mark’s Campanile in Venice). Buildings he regarded as temporary, nonacademic, or not particularly “serious” were designed in shingle or Collegiate Gothic styles; examples of these are North Gate Hall, Dwinelle Annex, and Stephens Hall. Many of Howard’s designs are recognized California Historical Landmarks and are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Built in 1873 in a Victorian Second-Empire-style, South Hall is the oldest university building in California. It, and the Frederick Law Olmsted-designed Piedmont Avenue east of the main campus, are the only remnants from the original University of California before John Galen Howard’s buildings were constructed. Other architects whose work can be found in the campus and surrounding area are Bernard Maybeck (best known for the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco), Maybeck’s student Julia Morgan (Hearst Women’s Gymnasium), Charles Willard Moore (Haas School of Business) and Joseph Esherick (Wurster Hall).
Flowing into the main campus are two branches of Strawberry Creek. The south fork enters a culvert upstream of the recreational complex at the mouth of Strawberry Canyon and passes beneath California Memorial Stadium before appearing again in Faculty Glade. It then runs through the center of the campus before disappearing underground at the west end of campus. The north fork appears just east of University House and runs through the glade north of the Valley Life Sciences Building, the original site of the Campus Arboretum. Trees in the area date from the founding of the University in the 1870s. The campus, itself, contains numerous wooded areas; including: Founders’ Rock, Faculty Glade, Grinnell Natural Area, and the Eucalyptus Grove, which is both the tallest stand of such trees in the world and the tallest stand of hardwood trees in North America. The campus sits on the Hayward Fault, which runs directly through California Memorial Stadium. There is ongoing construction to retrofit the stadium. The “treesit” protest revolved around the controversy of clearing away trees by the stadium to build the new Student Athlete High Performance Center. As the stadium sits directly on the fault, this raised campus concerns of the safety of student athletes in the event of an earthquake as they train in facilities under the stadium stands.
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