Site Selection

The site for the future building was determined in the context of major campus expansion and planning efforts. In the early 1950s the university was growing at an unprecedented rate. University enrollment had soared following the end of World War II, supported in large part by GI Bill financing. The population of California had doubled since the 1930s, and the percentage of California students seeking higher education was higher compared to the national average.

As a result, the university found itself with a serious lack of space for research and teaching. To address the problem the Regents in 1955 approved the formation of the Committee on Campus Planning, comprised of William Wurster, Chancellor Clark Kerr, and Regent Donald McLaughlin, and tasked them with the creation of a long-range development plan.

The outcome of the Committee’s work, the 1956 Long Range Development Plan, did away with the formal axial plan that had defined the Berkeley campus since the late nineteenth century. Instead of a grand procession of classical buildings arranged around a central east-west axis and minor cross-axis, the 1956 plan imagined campus as a series of clustered academic and research units within varied landscapes. In this framework, Wurster envisioned the “Environmental Design” building among the humanistic disciplines of art, anthropology, and music, which were emerging as a cluster in the southeast quadrant of campus.

To create a site large enough for the new building, part of College Avenue, which then ran through the campus, was closed and some small-scale structures and tennis courts removed. To preserve the park-like setting of campus, the 1956 campus plan also mandated that new buildings cover only 25 percent of campus land. Given this directive, the planned size of the new college made a tall building or tower element nearly inevitable. It helped that Wurster favored a tower element, which would create a gateway to the newly important southeast campus at the end of College Avenue.

By 1962 the new building was under construction. It would soon be the home to four departments: City and Regional Planning, Architecture, Decorative Arts, and Landscape Architecture.