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The UC Berkeley campus is notable as a reflection of the values and expressions of broad national patterns and eras of American landscape architecture. The evolution of American campus design, and UC Berkeley's association with it, provides the context within which to understand the Classical Core's significant cultural landscape.
During the Colonial and early 19th century, campus design in the United States looked to the moral benefits of the landscape and to the nurturing character of Jefferson's "Academical Village", as expressed at the University of Virginia, rather than to European prototypes of universities. Jefferson's ideas were borrowed from European models for hospitals and model industrial villages. Likewise, most campus planning made use of axial organization, straight roads, and buildings aligned within or bordering park-like landscapes reminiscent of village greens.
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The picturesque movement, begun in the 1820s, had a great effect on the first campus plan for the College of California, the predecessor to UC Berkeley. The 19th century American picturesque was a natural style, evolving in Europe from the English 18th century preference for "nature" over French Baroque "artifice". The picturesque style originated in England, where the gently rolling agrarian ideals of Lancelot "Capability" Brown evolved with the more dramatic picturesque vision of Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight with gnarled trees, chasms, and precipices. Andrew Jackson Downing, who later championed both of these styles as options for appropriate natural rolling topography, popularized the two in a style that has become known solely as the picturesque or the romantic style of landscape design. Downing's friend, Frederick Law Olmsted, Senior, and his partner Calvert Vaux would carry this approach forward after Downing's death in 1852, in the competition for Central Park in New York. The picturesque became a primary style of the consequential Olmsted/Vaux partnership, in which they firmly established the profession of Landscape Architecture.
Bacon Hall and campus flagpole in the picturesque era (ca.1898).
The College of California, UC Berkeley's predecessor institution, was the first to employ Frederick Law Olmsted to set the picturesque tone. In 1866, Olmsted developed a picturesque park-like campus plan with the major east-west axis set on a view of the Golden Gate, modeling it after Alexander Davis' and Howard Daniel's Llewellyn Park. His visionary landscape report for the College of California campus is also a significant project within the Olmsted legacy.
Under the tutelage of Olmsted, William Hammond Hall planned the first built incarnation of the University of California, Berkeley campus. Hall's 1875 layout was a product of the picturesque era, with its sloping topography and formidable views. The picturesque style relied heavily on tree canopy for its effects, which includes the filtered light of woodlands to contrast with open meadows and glades. On the UC Berkeley campus, historically important picturesque zones were the Botanical Garden, Strawberry Creek and environs, Founder's Rock, and the Eucalyptus Grove.
The UC Berkeley campus, while a new university in a new state, was well in line with other contemporary campuses in its use of the picturesque style. Vassar College (1861), with a picturesque plan centering on a single main academic building; Kansas State, similarly started with a single College Hall, Michigan Agricultural College (ca. 1860); and Iowa State University were all based on the picturesque landscape.
Hall's 1875 layout for UC Berkeley took place at the zenith of the picturesque era. Less than twenty years later, the beaux-arts neoclassical era, with its focus toward Europe, would become the prevailing style of the day.
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John Galen Howard's Hearst Memorial Mining Building (ca. 1922).
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The University of California, Berkeley is historically and architecturally notable for its "International Competition for the Phoebe Hearst Architectural Plan, 1897-1899", managed by architect Bernard Maybeck. Although John Galen Howard placed fourth in the competition and French architect Emile Benard placed first, Howard ultimately would serve as the UC Berkeley campus architect for over 20 years. The core of the Berkeley campus by John Galen Howard is considered to be one of the largest, most complete beaux-arts neoclassical ensembles ever executed in permanent materials in the history of American architecture. As of the 1930s, no other campus in the United States appears to have achieved UC Berkeley's combination of beaux-arts neoclassical architecture set primarily within a picturesque landscape.
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The beaux-arts neoclassical style ascended in the United States during the last decade of the 19th Century with the work of such architectural firms as McKim, Mead and White. Soon, the beaux-arts neoclassical style eclipsed all others to reach its first apogee as the primary architectural character of Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition (the "White City"), where Frederick Law Olmsted was the landscape architect. Plans for the Washington Mall followed, and many cities determined the style was an appropriate statement of national - and international - status.
The beaux-arts neoclassical style utilized plans (partis), architectural form, and detail prototypes from eras where great economic and political power was manifested in design. The Caesar's of Rome and the 17th century French monarchs employed classical typologies driven by strong geometry for their public "personas". For American architects and landscape architects in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the beaux-arts neoclassical style provided a style for both building and site design that expressed America's "coming of age" as a great international power. Grand vistas were often a part of these designs, usually taking the axial form of roads, water features, or "tapis verts" (great expanses of lawn).
Within the UC Berkeley Classical Core, a compromise was reached early on between the picturesque landscape and the beaux-arts neoclassical composition. In their original Hearst Competition entries, both the Howard and Bénard plans intended that the creek would be covered for most of its length by new construction. The competition prospectus, however, noted that preservation of the natural landscape and strict limits on grading were to be a priority for the final submissions. By 1900, Bénard's winning plan showed Strawberry Creek weaving in and out of a beaux-arts neoclassical design parti. This was only the first of the retreats of the "artificial" beaux-arts neoclassical style when faced by the staying power of the "natural" style of the picturesque. In Howard's later beaux-arts neoclassical plan of 1908, buildings and formal landscape terraces still were intended to work together as a single symphonic beaux-arts neoclassical composition. However, much of the portion of Howard's parti that involved terraces and plazas, including his plan for what is now the Central Glade open space, was never built. The result was that the Classical Core of the campus remained a combination of predominantly neoclassical structures within a predominantly picturesque landscape.
Howard's early beaux-arts neoclassical plan for the upper reaches of the Central
Glade (ca. 1914).
Another noted American beaux-arts neoclassical campus is Columbia University in New York City (1894) by Charles F. McKim. This plan also combined a beaux-arts neoclassical ground-plane parti and neoclassical architecture. However, the Columbia campus was deliberately conceived as an urban campus, built to fit within metropolitan confines, and lacked the grand exterior landscape frame of reference - the Berkeley Hills and the Golden Gate - that set the UC Berkeley campus within a regional frame.
Campus plans with strong beaux-arts neoclassical partis that did not employ neoclassical architecture included the Olmsted and Coolidge plan for Stanford University (1888), designed in the
Richardsonian-Romanesque, and the Horace Trumbauer plan for the West Campus of Duke University (1925). Trumbauer designed the latter with African-American architect Julian Abele in the collegiate gothic style. Both of these campuses have maintained a strong period plan in their historic cores, without contemporary overlays. The same is true of the plan for Rice University, which has preserved its historic beaux-arts neoclassical parti (ca. 1910) and its eclectic collection of historic core buildings.
The closest parallel to the Berkeley campus may be at the University of Washington in Seattle, another site that benefited from a strong beaux-arts neoclassical parti. Originally a picturesque landscape centering on Denny Hall (1891-1900), the Olmsted Brothers (1904), Gould (1915), and Bebb and Gould (1920) plans for the University of Washington all show strong beaux-arts neoclassical plans. Most important to its beaux-arts neoclassical landscape was its interim use during 1909 as the site of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, for which UC Berkeley architect John Galen Howard and landscape architects the Olmsted Brothers designed a magnificent beaux-arts neoclassical site plan. In direct contrast to Howard's work at UC Berkeley, the University of Washington's beaux-arts axial landscape has been retained, while most of its neoclassical Exposition buildings were destroyed.
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The north facade of Doe Memorial Library (ca. 1936).
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The UC Berkeley campus began as a picturesque landscape and owes its axes to Olmsted and John Galen Howard. While the campus developed a strong beaux-arts neoclassical parti, it lacks an intact beaux-arts neoclassical layer. Finally, the campus has faced the challenges of major post-war design layers while retaining some elements, through contemporary campus plans, of its beaux-arts neoclassical heritage.
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The mission of landscape architecture changed radically from the Great Depression through the 1970s. The profound impact of the automobile, not just on the land but in how people move through the landscape, and the increasing requirement that landscape should be functional caused a re-evaluation of design principles. The intent of the modern era was to acknowledge the industrial era and to pare away the "styles" to gain greater honesty of form.
Three students of the Harvard University Landscape Architecture Department, Garrett Eckbo, James Rose, and Dan Kiley, and one faculty member, Christopher Tunnard, experimented with modern design principles and applied them to landscape architectural design. Their work was characterized by simplicity, strong spatial organization, relaxed and informal "outdoor" livability, and relatively low maintenance costs. In Tunnard's vision, the tenets of this new style would be functionalism, aesthetic beauty, and "empathy" with the site. Some of the finest modern unions of site and landscape architectural design also would appear in the work of UC Berkeley graduate and campus planner Thomas Church.
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View looking northeast from the West Circle (ca. 1936).
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Church, who produced a Landscape Master Plan for the campus, also helped to frame the 1962 Long Range Development Plan (LRDP) that guided campus development for nearly 30 years. In the comprehensive 1962 LRDP, Church sought to prioritize pedestrian movement over vehicular and preserve open space, preserve the rustic essence of the picturesque period, enhance the beaux-arts neoclassical areas, and begin a modern layer of geometric site definition. Church's extensive campus design work, undertaken in collaboration with campus Architect Louis DeMonte, was in keeping with the principles from the LRDP.
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Other modern campus plans of this era include Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's work at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago (1938-1940); Dan Kiley and Skidmore Owings and Merrill's plan for the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs (1954-1962); Foothill Community College by Sasaki Walker Associates with architects Ernest J. Kump and Master & Hurd (1959); and Church's design (with Warnecke and Associates) for the UC campus at Santa Cruz (1963-1965). However, these projects did not have the challenge of integrating the work of previous design eras, as Church did at UC Berkeley.
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