Built 1949. Home to many of the university Library's special collections, including one of the largest collections of Western Americana, the library was founded with Hubert Howe Bancroft's 19th century gift of his extensive library of California and Western history. The Bancroft also includes the Mark Twain Papers, the Regional Oral History Office, the University of California Archives, and other collections and artifacts. The building, designed by Arthur Brown Jr., reopened in 2009 after a major seismic upgrade; its newly renovated interior is one of the campus’s most beautiful spaces....
Built 1964. Although home to Berkeley's architecture department, Bauer Wurster is often voted Berkeley's ugliest building for its Brutalist, bare concrete appearance. But some of the "ugliness" is a result of functionality, like the concrete sunshades over windows to minimize energy costs. It was named for William Wurster, dean of the School of Architecture and its successor, the College of Environmental Design (1950-62), and his wife, lecturer Catherine Bauer Wurster.
Built 1980. Named for Stephen D. Bechtel, who attended Berkeley before taking the reins of the Bechtel engineering empire. It houses the Kresge Engineering Library, Sibley Auditorium, and student and interdisciplinary studies offices.
Building Details
Floors: 3
Accessible entrances: The main entrance on the level one enters at grade but does not provide an automatic opener. The level 2 south entrance does provide an opener.
Restrooms: Usable restrooms are located on the level on and level two.
Named for Charles Franklin Doe, who came from Maine in 1857 as a schoolteacher and made his fortune in California. He left a quarter of his estate to the university for construction of a new library. The Beaux Arts building, which features the magnificently restored North Reading Room and the cozy Morrison Library, was the centerpiece of architect John Galen Howard's classical campus ensemble. The placement of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, over the main entrance reflects Berkeley's aspiration to become the "Athens of the West." The building was placed on the National Register of...
Built 1971. Original home of much of the computer infrastructure on campus, the building gets poor reviews because of its dark, closed-in design, its massive scale, and its unfortunate location spoiling the main east-west axis of the campus and what was intended to be a spectacular view out to the Golden Gate. Named for Griffith Evans, math department chair from 1934-49.`
Building Details
Floors: 12
Accessible entrances: There is a usable entrance on the east side of the building on level one that provides an automatic opener. The north side...
Built 1995 & 2018. The Haas School is a mini-campus of four buildings set around a central courtyard. Two classrooms buildings — Cheit Hall and Chou Hall — house lecture halls, flexible classrooms, seminar rooms featuring or state-of-the-art technology. The Haas campus also includes a computer lab, career management center, several event spaces, Think Cafe, and a business library. The first three buildings — the Student Services Building, the Gerson Bakar Faculty Building, and Cheit Hall — were designed by Charles Moore and opened in 1995. Chou Hall was completed in 2018 to focus...
Built 2004. Home of the No. 1 academic library in the United States, this high-tech building in the "arts quadrangle" houses 190,000 volumes of printed music, books, and periodicals; more than 50,000 recordings; manuscripts; and other rare materials.
Built 1966. Named after Joel Hildebrand, longtime chemistry professor and dean, and the inventor of Chem-1A's fabled Big Game Titration. The building houses graduate research laboratories, undergraduate teaching labs, and the chemistry library.
Building Details
Floors: 7
Accessible entrances: There are two entrances to Hildebrand. The first is the breezway accessible from the south. The second is the library and its entrance on the western side of the building.
Restrooms: There are usable restrooms located on the...
Built 1970. Moffitt Library offers a 24 hour environment for individual and group study space, plus course reserves, a makerspace, campus classrooms, and convenient access to the research collections in the Gardner (MAIN) Stacks. FSM Cafe in Moffitt is open to all visitors; library access is limited to UC Berkeley students and faculty.
Building Details
Floors: 5
Accessible entrances: The main entrance (also the only exterior entrance) is located on level three on the south side of the building. The sets of double doors lead to the main...
Built 1906. This John Galen Howard building originally housed the School of Architecture and was affectionately called "the Ark." Added to the National Register if Historic Places in 1982.
Built 2008. Berkeley’s vast collection of East Asian manuscripts and artifacts -- assembled over the past century -- is housed in this library, the first freestanding structure at a U.S. university erected solely for East Asian collections. The library is home to more than 900,000 volumes, primarily in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, plus thousands of manuscripts, rubbings, and the largest and most valuable collection of historic Japanese maps outside of Japan. It is also the largest U.S. academic repository of materials on the People's Republic of China. It is named for the late Cornelius...
Built 1923. The building, which formerly served as the Student Union, was designed in Collegiate Gothic style by John Galen Howard and named for Henry Morse Stephens, a professor and student adviser.
Built 1930. Named not for its location but for Wayne and Gladys Valley, who contributed toward the vast building's major renovation in the early 1990s. The largest building in Berkeley (and the largest concrete building west of the Mississippi) when it was built in 1930, it remains the biggest building on campus, at over 400,000 square feet. Original exterior decorations from the George Kelham design include animal-shaped ornaments and the names of eight life science disciplines. Inside highlights include a giant T-Rex skeleton fronting the Museum of Paleontology.
