The campus of the University of California, Berkeley, and its surrounding community are home to a number of notable buildings by early 20th-century campus architect John Galen Howard, his peer Bernard Maybeck (best known for the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts), and their colleague Julia Morgan. Subsequent tenures as supervising architect held by George W. Kelham and Arthur Brown, Jr. saw the addition of several buildings in neoclassical and other revival styles, while the building boom after World War II introduced modernist buildings by architects such as Vernon DeMars, Joseph Esherick, John Carl Warnecke, Gardner Dailey, Anshen & Allen, and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Recent decades have seen additions including the postmodernist Haas School of Business by Charles Willard Moore, Soda Hall by Edward Larrabee Barnes, and the East Asian Library by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects.
Much of the UC Berkeley campus, including the major landmarks, is in the city limits of Berkeley. A portion of the UC Berkeley property extends into Oakland.
Beginnings (1860–1900)
The first of farmland in Berkeley were acquired by the privately held College of California in 1858, and the site was dedicated on April 16, 1860. Frederick Law Olmsted was commissioned to design the campus in 1864. Olmsted's design followed the City Beautiful movement and was sensitive to the natural topography, including Strawberry Creek, which ran through the site, and proposed an east–west axis aligned with the Golden Gate. If Olmsted's plan had been implemented, the campus would consist of student villages for living and learning, linked by meandering paths and surrounded by parks. He praised the site's distance from burgeoning San Francisco, providing both "a suitable degree of seclusion and a suitable degree of association" with the cosmopolitan world. However, only "two considerable buildings would be required at [this] early period": a library and general assembly hall with classrooms. The first two common buildings, completed as North and South Hall in 1873, were built approximately where Olmsted had proposed.
After the College of California became the public University of California in 1868, Olmsted's plans were set aside as impractical (mainly parkland, with only two major buildings) in favor of new plans from David Farquharson in 1869, although these plans also were never fully implemented. Shortly after Daniel Coit Gilman was named the president of the University of California in 1872, William Hammond Hall wrote to Samuel F. Butterworth, a regent, and proposed to design the campus without remuneration for his services. Hall presented his final plan in February 1874; it was adopted and implemented slowly over the next twenty-five years, generally following Olmsted's ideas. Very little of these early University of California campus design implementations () remain, with the Victorian Second Empire-style South Hall (1873, Kenitzer and Farquharson) and Piedmont Avenue (Olmsted) being notable exceptions.
What is considered the historic campus today resulted from the 1898 "International Competition for the Phoebe Hearst Architectural Plan for the University of California," funded by the wealthy eponymous philanthropist mother of William Randolph Hearst and initially held in Antwerp; eleven finalists were judged again in San Francisco the next year. This unprecedented competition came about from one-upmanship between the prominent Hearst and Stanford families of the Bay Area. In response to the founding of Stanford University, the Hearst Family decided to "adopt" the fledgling University of California and develop their own world-class institution. Although Émile Bénard, a Frenchman, won the competition, he disliked the "uncultured" San Francisco atmosphere and refused to personally revise the plan to the site. He was replaced by fourth-place winner John Galen Howard, who would become UC Berkeley's resident campus architect in 1901. Only University House, designed by architect Albert Pissis and completed in 1911 as a residence for the President of the University of California, was placed according to the original Bénard plan; today it is the residence of UC Berkeley's Chancellor. However, the general campus orientation initially proposed by Olmsted and followed by his successors has persisted, with the main axis of the campus running uphill from west to east along what is now Campanile Way.
Beaux-Arts era (1901–1950) For the first half of the 20th century, Berkeley campus architecture was led by a series of three notable Bay Area architects famed for their work in San Francisco: John Galen Howard (1901–1924), George W. Kelham (1927–1936), and Arthur Brown, Jr. (1938–1948).