Library

Hargrove Music Library

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.

Building Details

[under construction]

Haas School of Business

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...

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

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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]

Doe Memorial Library

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...

Bechtel Engineering Center

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.

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Bancroft Library

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...

Hildebrand Hall

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....

Main (Gardner) Stacks

Building Details

[under construction]

Starr East Asian Library

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...