Classrooms

Wheeler Hall

Named for Benjamin Ide Wheeler, university president during Berkeley's "golden years" from 1899-1919. The French Baroque facade includes arched doorways leading into a vaulted auditorium lobby, ionic columns across the middle floors, and a colonnade ornamented with urn-shaped lamps symbolizing, according to designer John Galen Howard, "the light of learning." It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

Building Details

Floors: 5
Year built: 1917
Accessible entrances: There are two usable...

Soda Hall

Built 1994. Funded by the Y & H Soda Foundation and named in honor of Y. Charles and Helen Soda as a tribute to their commitment to education in the Bay Area. With classrooms, labs, and offices, Soda Hall was designed with its Computer Science residents in mind: its open alcoves encourage informal interactions among students and faculty, and its labs and offices are grouped to foster a team approach to computing innovation. In Soda Hall, "the building is the computer," with advanced networking, wireless capabilities, and access to computer clusters for shared computing power,...

McCone Hall

Built 1961. Designed by John Warnecke, McCone Hall houses several academic departments in the earth sciences, as well as the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, one of the world's foremost centers for the study of earthquakes, and the Earth Sciences and Map Library. It is named for alumnus and former CIA director John McCone.

Building Details

Floors: 7

Accessible entrances: There are three entrances to McCone Hall. The south side ground level entrance is usable...

Latimer Hall

Built 1963. Named for Wendell Latimer, dean of the College of Chemistry in the 1940s, the building contains chemistry labs and classrooms. On the plaza southwest of Latimer Hall is a cupola, all that remains of the original chemistry building on campus.

Building Details

Floors: 11

Accessible entrances: The breezeway entrance to the building has usable entrances on both the north and south side of the facility.

Restrooms: There is a set of...

Social Sciences Building (SSB)

Built 1964. Formerly named Barrows Hall for David Prescott Barrows, political science professor and president of the university from 1919-23. This building was de-named in recognition of UC Berkeley's commitment to social justice and equity.

Building Information

Floors: 10
Accessible entrances: Four Automatic entrances located on the Ground floor. Three are located on East and West corners of the building, while the fourth is accessed via a ramp on the north side courtyard.

Restrooms:...

Bauer Wurster Hall

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.

Building Details

Floors: 11

...

Stephens Hall

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.

Building Details

[under construction]

Pimentel Hall

Built 1964. Pimentel's circular lecture hall is on the cutting edge of classroom technology, including a revolving stage that allows multiple professors to teach, clean up, and set up at the same time, so that the room can be used continuously despite the long setup times involved in chemistry lectures.

Building Details

Floors: 2

Accessible entrances: There are two entrances to the building. The main entrance that faces west is usable...

Sutardja Dai Hall (CITRIS)

Built 2009. This 141,000-square-foot building is the headquarters of CITRIS, the multi-campus interdisciplinary research program that is one of four California Institutes for Science and Innovation. The building houses research labs, faculty offices, a nanofabrication lab, an auditorium, and a cyber café. CITRIS work aims to improve energy efficiency, transportation, environmental monitoring, seismic safety, education, cultural research and health care. The building honors a team of accomplished Berkeley engineering graduates: brothers Sehat and Pantas Sutardja and Weili Dai,...

Dwinelle Hall

Built 1952. With more than 300,000 square feet of office and classroom space, an infuriating room-numbering system, and a layout often likened to a maze, Dwinelle is the second largest building on campus. It is named for John W. Dwinelle, a UC regent, state assemblyman, and author of the 1868 "Organic Act" establishing the University of California. In the center is Ishi Court, named in honor of a Native American "found" by anthropologist Alfred Kroeber near Oroville, CA, in 1911 and brought to live in the UC Berkeley Museum of Anthropology.

...