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No one wants to build another Evans Hall. A towering modernist eyesore plunked smack in the middle of the most picturesque part of campus, Evans clashes with the classical facade of John Galen Howard’s Hearst Mining Building, blocks sightlines to the hills, dominates the visible campus from at least three cardinal directions, and inspires nothing but vitriol from campus planners and architectural critics. “It is out of scale and context with the buildings around it,” says Ed Denton ’70, vice chancellor for new capital projects. “It looks like an office building on steroids,” says city planning professor David Dowall. “You look at the campus and wonder how it could possibly have been built,” says planner Kerry O’Banion ’71. “I’d like to tear it down,” says Chancellor Robert Berdahl. Comments like these are foremost in the minds of campus planners as they embark on the New Century Plan, an ambitious effort to direct the development of the campus for the 21st century. The New Century Plan is the most visionary University planning initiative—in fact, it is the only visionary University planning initiative—since John Galen Howard started building the central campus at the turn of the 19th century (see page 24). Screwing it up with something like Evans is the last thing they want to do. But anyone who looks to the New Century Plan to find out what campus buildings will be torn down and where others might be built in the future will be disappointed. The goal here is not necessarily a good plan, but rather good planning. “This is not about imagining a particular future; it’s about planning to be agile and able to respond to various futures, ” says planner Kerry O’Banion. Previously, O’Banion says, campus building projects were “reactions to particular needs and particular pots of money available at the time.” Sacrificing John Galen Howard’s central glade by sticking Evans Hall in the middle of it may seem like folly today, “but at the time, persuasive arguments were probably made for programmatic needs. We lacked a comprehensive planning framework to make the best decision.” The New Century Plan will not contain specific building projects, budget projections, or detailed plans; those will begin to appear next year, in the campus’s first Long Range Development Plan (LRDP) since 1990. The New Century Plan is a far more important document: a “decision model,” intended to provide the overarching vision that drives campus development, as well as direction for the next LRDP, and several LRDPs after that. In other words, the campus is trying to think big—bigger than the next ten years, bigger even than the next fifty years. During the brainstorming sessions that have constituted the early part of the New Century Plan, outside consultants with no ties to Berkeley were brought in to mix with the Blue and Gold blood already on the planning team, and everyone was encouraged to look at the campus with fresh eyes. The ideas embraced by the plan ranged from the obvious (We need to fix the parking situation) to the heretical (Do we really need the botanical garden?) to the visionary (What is the next great advance in scientific research, and how do we build space for it?). “I want to put a [decision-making] structure in place that ensures our facilities will support our academic and research mission from now on,” says Ed Denton, who holds the newly created post of vice chancellor for capital projects and is at the helm of the New Century Plan. “The legacy we leave now will be there for a long time.” Why now? Primarily because the University is about to undergo a massive effort to ensure earthquake safety. The oldest campus in the UC system has a number of buildings that are outdated and many more that are seismically unsafe. A two-year survey rated 95 campus buildings as seismically “poor” or “very poor,” and the University plans to spend $1.2 billion retrofitting and replacing them over the next twenty years. “Part of the New Century Plan is to make sure we invest those dollars wisely,” says O’Banion. “We don’t want to fix a building that is functionally obsolete. We don’t want to retrofit something that’s not a long-term keeper.” Another immediate challenge is growth. The 1990 LRDP assumed that reductions in student enrollment would ease parking and housing woes. Instead, the UC system is now expecting “Tidal Wave II,” an additional 63,000 students by 2010, as the children of the Baby Boomers hit college. Berkeley will have to find a way to accommodate its share of the enrollment boom, despite being stretched to its limits. As it happens, the issue of what the campus’s “limits” are is a key part of the thinking behind the New Century Plan. The plan attempts to look beyond the boundaries of the core campus and consider the development of other University-owned properties, including the Clark Kerr Campus (formerly the California School for the Deaf and Blind) in Berkeley and undeveloped land in Albany and Richmond. And, for that matter, the finite amount of land owned by the campus is not its only resource for future growth. The plan envisions several future scenarios that would expand the campus’s limits. (Caveat lector: these are ideas taken to extremes, not plans, and the New Century Plan in its finished form may mix and match ideas from several of them.) The virtual campus: The campus is expanded by electronic means, and enrollment growth is accommodated by distance learning. Satellite facilities are set up throughout California, perhaps throughout the world, to deliver “academic programming” from the University. The main campus and the Clark Kerr Campus continue to provide human interaction and the typical undergraduate experience. The urban campus: The park-like setting of the campus can no longer be maintained; instead, a truly urbanized campus is created. Additional “infill” building sites are created by rethinking the use of open space, plazas, and courtyards; parking and other types of infrastructure go underground, where possible. University in the city: Rather than develop the distant Richmond and Albany sites, the campus grows farther into its surrounds in the city of Berkeley—down University Avenue toward the Bay, up Strawberry Canyon into the hills, and along College, Shattuck, and Telegraph Avenues. This option would depend on a level of cooperation between the campus and Berkeley neighbors that currently does not exist. The streetcar campus: Taking advantage of opportunities in development-friendly Oakland and Emeryville, the campus sells its land in Richmond and uses the money to develop towards the south. The campus could put labs in Emeryville, offices and housing in downtown Oakland, and run transit connections—as well as telecommunication links—between these communities and the main campus. A network of campuses: The University’s satellite properties become distinct campuses with their own special characters. Richmond could be a biomedical tech park; like Lawrence Berkeley Lab after World War II, it could help keep the University at the forefront of research into a new field. Albany could combine graduate student housing and research, while Clark Kerr could be an undergraduate residential college. The core campus would assume a less primary role. No growth: Instead of fulfilling its needs through expansion, the campus reconsiders its needs. New construction is considered a last resort, and offices are shuffled around to optimize use of existing space. The campus is deemed to have a limited capacity for students, faculty, and programmatic space, and this is not exceeded. Hard decisions must sometimes to be made, according to a set of “core values” identified by the plan. In some respects, coming up with the broad vision is the easy part. Even after the “decision model” is finalized this fall, it will be a massive job to transform it into actual development plans down the road. Thousands of decisions, large and small, will gradually shape the campus for the future. Major issues have yet to be decided. How will office space be shuffled when buildings are torn down? Should new construction conform to a single architectural style? Should vehicle traffic be made easier, or discouraged in favor of pedestrians and transit? How much housing should the University be expected to provide for students, staff, and faculty? The list goes on and on. “Luckily, we have a chancellor who understands the importance of facilities to the academic and research mission,” says Denton of Berdahl, who oversaw a master planning effort at the University of Texas. “We’re in good shape for implementing a new decision-making process here. And, hopefully, 40 years from now, we won’t be asking questions about our buildings the way we have about Evans.” |
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