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By Linda Schmidt When Phoebe Apperson Hearst laid the cornerstone for the Hearst Memorial Mining Building in 1902 as a tribute to her husband, the miner and senator George Hearst, she was promised an edifice that would be "both monument and workshop." What she got five years later was a "Temple of Science and the Industrial Arts," with its numerous flues to vent the furnaces and smelting rooms, a multi-story interior mining lab surrounded by viewing galleries, and the latest in metallurgical research tools. University President Benjamin Ide Wheeler extolled the grand project: "This building will be adequate for all the needs of the department for years to come. It is so planned that it can be infinitely enlarged without sacrifice of symmetry or beauty." In the intervening decades, the building served its purpose admirably. True to University architect John Galen Howard's plan, the building was expanded in many ways. Throughout the century, as the College of Mining evolved into the Department of Materials Science Engineering, the original light wells and central gallery were partitioned and filled in with new labs and offices to accommodate the growing number of faculty and students, as well as the newest scientific instruments. Today, after a $90-million retrofit and renovation program that took more than a decade, the building has again been transformed, in ways that even John Galen Howard could not have anticipated. Although the Hearst Memorial Mining Building set the standard for a modern engineering laboratory of the early 1900s, there was one technological advance the building lacked. Constructed of granite and concrete, it had no internal steel reinforcement to help withstand the force of an earthquake. "Reinforced concrete was a brilliant invention, but the Hearst project missed it by just a couple of years," says Brendan Kelly, project architect from the firm NBBJ, which oversaw the renovation contract. A year before the completion of the Hearst project, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 showed how vulnerable such buildings could be. "At the time, reinforced concrete seemed like a crazy idea," explains Kelly. "But across the Bay at her own campus, Jane Stanford, who was one of Phoebe Hearst's contemporaries and rivals, had allowed reinforced concrete to be used in constructing the Leland Stanford Junior Museum." That building was one of the few in the Bay Area that survived the '06 quake unscathed (although most of the museum's unreinforced brick additions collapsed). Throughout the 20th century, even as the Hearst building kept pace with changes in the field of engineering, no seismic strengthening was put in place. By the early 1990s, it was clear that the Mining Building was in severe need of rehabilitation. Not only was the building constructed of unreinforced masonry, which is likely to suffer a catastrophic failure in the event of an earthquake, it also sits just 800 feet from the Hayward Fault. Furthermore, much of the department's modern-day equipment had been shoehorned into cramped and inappropriate spaces, and the building's basic mechanical systems, such as electricity and ventilation, were insufficient to support the needs of faculty and student research projects. Moreover, the building is on both the state and national registries of historic places, meaning any renovation plan would have to meet strict architectural guidelines. "It always sounded to me like the story in The Wizard of Oz--looking for courage, a heart, and a brain," says Kelly. "The building needed courage to face an earthquake. The heart, of course, was architectural merit. And brains were the mechanical improvements: every utility system that goes in and out of the building--air, data, electricity, you name it--needed to be completely replaced. The vision for us was a hat trick: You couldn't do one or two without affecting the third." The key step in the seismic retrofit was to place the building on a "base isolation" system. Developed by structural engineers at Berkeley in the 1970s, base isolation replaces standard foundation piers with devices that allow a building to move horizontally, insulating it from the ground motion of an earthquake. "This is the first time that this technology has come back to benefit a Berkeley building," says Kelly. "It's a critical technology for very valuable old buildings that are in vulnerable places." In the Hearst building, new steel piers replaced old concrete foundations, and 134 isolators were installed. Constructed of dozens of layers of rubber and steel, the isolators act as shock absorbers, allowing a horizontal shift of up to 30 inches in any direction. To accommodate such motion, an empty "moat" now surrounds the building's base. Similar systems have proven highly effective in large earthquakes, such as those in Northridge and Kobe, Japan. "I really do feel much safer in this building," says Ron Gronsky, a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering who served as chair of the building's Seismic and Program Improvements Committee. "I wouldn't mind a little earthquake. I have a primitive seismograph here"--a pointed pendulum suspended over a dish of sand sits on his desk--"and as the ground shakes it will map out the trajectory of the ground motion. I've got a camera in my desk drawer. I'll take a photograph of it." The care taken in preserving the historic elements of the building is clearly evident today. Throughout the structure, doors and window frames were removed, refinished, and set back in place. "Some of them had so many coats of paint that you couldn't tell if it was a steel window or a wood window," says Kelly. Workmen also uncovered the original yellow brick flooring in Memorial Hall, which the design team assumed had been destroyed in the course of the building's many earlier remodelings. "The looks on their faces was as if it was an archaeological dig, they were so excited to have found that floor," Kelly says of the workers who made the discovery. "It was hidden under two layers of linoleum." The vaulted tile ceiling in Memorial Hall has been stabilized with fiberglass beams, steel mesh, urethane foam, and a series of nearly invisible pins; and the newly waterproofed roofing system is capped with original University of California red clay tile. "Every tile on that roof has been replaced--by the manufacturer who made the tiles back in 1907," says Gronsky. "They found the original mold that was used for the clay tile back then, and all of these are now made to exactly the same specifications. It's perfect. This building has received that level of attention to its history." But the beauty of the Hearst restoration is more than just skin deep. The entire infrastructure of the building has been replaced with utility systems to support the electrical, ventilation, telecommunications, and other needs of a department at the forefront of 21st-century research. And the building, which did not even include a women's room in its original design, is now in full compliance with all structural and accessibility codes. The Department of Materials Science Engineering also saw the renovation as an opportunity to reinvent its own fundamental workings. "We brought about a way of thinking about a research laboratory environment that was different from the perspective of most campuses, but not so different from what folks in industry have done," says Gronsky. Rather than providing empty space for each faculty member, as is the traditional academic model, Hearst now features fully equipped, state-of-the-art laboratories designed around functional uses--labs devoted to materials synthesis, testing, and characterization are to be shared by anyone doing work
"It just makes better sense to have this type of communal approach to science," Gronsky explains. "Science is a community activity. We have to share our data; there's a new awareness of the need to publish in an open, honest, and forthright sort of way; and when the original science is conducted that way, everyone wins." This conceptual leap also benefited the structural renovation. "It led to huge efficiencies because we were able to move all the laboratories downstairs," says Kelly. This consolidation permitted the architects to install complicated systems, such as intensive ventilation, in specific locations rather than having to route them throughout the building. Faculty members in turn received larger-than-average workshops and offices upstairs, where they can conduct review sessions, qualifying exams, and research meetings. There is yet another benefit of preserving a historic building to house state-of-the-art research and teaching facilities. "Advances in science are all based upon a long and rich tradition of study in those areas," Gronsky points out. "This building reeks of tradition. This building reminds folks who do work in materials that where all of this started is in the extraction of raw materials from the ground. It causes people to pause and think: 'Why am I doing this? Why is this so important? How does this fit into the global scheme of things?'" But the renovation was not a quick or easy task. Faculty and graduate students had to be moved from the Mining Building to labs and offices in a half-dozen other campus buildings and the Lawrence Berkeley Lab as early as 1994. Undergraduate classes were barred from meeting in Hearst's classrooms even earlier because of the seismic risk. And, though occupants were expected to move back into the building in early 2001, the first faculty were only able to return in January of this year. Some classrooms and labs are already being used, but the building will not be fully up and running until at least next fall. Initial budget projections placed the cost of the renovation at $68 million; by the end of the project, the actual cost was over $90 million. While $34 million came from voter-approved bond funds, the remainder was provided through private fundraising efforts. "We were very concerned with cost and schedule, which go with every big messy architectural project on university campuses," says Kelly. But weather delays, the technical difficulty of the project, and changes in the department's physical needs for lab and office space during the course of the project all affected the bottom line. "You could get a very decent laboratory facility for half the price," says Kelly, "but you wouldn't have the historic resource, and you wouldn't have a building that would last another hundred years." Despite these difficulties, most agree that the results have been fairly spectacular. "Everyone who comes by to see this building appreciates that we have met all of our goals," says Gronsky. "We have the historical treatment done, I think, even better than expected. The seismic side is also a big winner." In February, the California Preservation Foundation presented the project with a design award for "craftsmanship and preservation techniques." "It's a remarkable thing for the University to take a 100-year-old building and turn it into a modern laboratory. It's very visionary stuff," comments Kelly. "But it's definitely within the framework of the people who put the building there in the first place--they were big thinkers, too. It's nice to be in that crowd." |
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