Following a national trend toward town-gown detente, a contentious conflict on the edge of Berkeley's campus ends with an architecturally conservative solution.

BY ALLEN FREEMAN

The city of Berkeley rises gradually from San Francisco Bay and then climbs steeply around stands of oaks, redwoods, and eucalyptus trees from which there are dead-on vistas of the Golden Gate and its beautiful bridge. In the early 1860s, along a woodland creek named Strawberry, several Yale-educated preachers intent on civilizing '49ers staked out the present campus of the first University of California. Thirty years later, mining heiress Phoebe Apperson Hearst started funding a string of initiatives including a master plan, a mining school, and a gymnasium.

In 1964, a Berkeley student named Mario Savio led sit-ins, folk-singer Joan Baez gave a concert, students were arrested en masse, professors canceled classes in sympathy, the university president was fired, and a movement for free speech and student rights seethed and spread to other campuses across the country. A decade after that, newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, 19, three generations down the line from Phoebe, was kidnapped from her Berkeley apartment by radicals calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army, who persuaded her to participate in a fatal bank heist. And yes, Berkeley is where Dustin Hoffman ran away with Katharine Ross at the end of The Graduate.

City and university, Berkeley is widely perceived to be the bastion of northern California­style liberalism. A close look, however, reveals residents exhibiting not-in-my-back-yard tendencies. Public housing? You bet, but not right here. A new fire station in the tinderbox residential hills? Nope; too noisy.

NIMBY sentiments complement preservation issues when the university, which consumes 160 acres of sloping East Berkeley real estate, nudges its way beyond one of the three sides of the campus that butt against the town. Townies may recognize the founding campus of the state's university system as the giant that puts their hilly town on the map. Yet they rail against expansion—not, considering the insensitivity of some university construction, without good reason.

Automobiles and intimations of high-rise buildings also set off townies, who don't want gownies' cars clogging the streets and fouling the air. But they also don't want tall residential buildings that would concentrate university housing near the campus and make better use of public transportation (which they support in principle). All in all, Berkeley, a city of about 100,000, resembles other college towns that attract a lot of highly educated, opinionated, sometimes self-important people whose work to a large extent is not obviously consequential. As one local puts it, "There's a great deal of presentation of self as having the right views, which can tend to displace respect for the realities of life."

The student radicals of '64 occupied Sproul Hall on the south side of the main campus. Five years ago, just across Hearst Avenue on the north edge, where a handsome old residential neighborhood begins, a less widely reported tempest blew up. On a vacant corner lot, paved and used for years as parking spaces, the university's graduate school of public policy proposed to build an annex. Contested in principle by neighbors who were supported by the Berkeley preservation establishment, a three-story building containing 13,000 square feet of space went up and was fully functioning by last September. It's not a stretch to say that the neighbors and city preservationists now approve of what was built, and that acceptance ultimately came because the school's faculty and its architects got to know the local residents and listened to their concerns. (BREAK HERE) Last May, some 100 people from academe nationwide and from the communities that surround campuses were invited to Chicago for a conference, underwritten by the Getty Trust, that looked into campus preservation and town-gown issues.

"As universities grow, they run out of land," says landscape architect Robert Melnick, organizer of the conference and dean of the School of Architecture and Allied Arts at the University of Oregon. "If they want to protect their historic resources, that means protecting not only the architecture but also the campus plan, the campus landscape. Very often, that translates into moving beyond the campus edges and into the surrounding historic neighborhood."

At the same time, "more than ever before, institutions of higher learning recognize that they are part of larger communities," he continues. "There's a general sense that the ivory tower has faded away, and with that has come greater attention to community issues." Yale, for instance, which owns seven percent of the land in New Haven and employs 10,000 of its 124,000 residents, created the post of vice president for New Haven relations in 1997. In Washington, D.C., Howard University, once a LeDroit Park slumlord, is restoring its local reputation as well as the proximate late-19th-century neighborhood. Nationwide, reconciliation between town and gown can be traced back to the aftermath of the mid-1960s campus antiwar and civil rights movements that began on the Berkeley campus.

A generation earlier, U.C.-Berkeley had responded to California's post­World War II population growth with an ambitious building program. Modernist buildings—good, bad, and indifferent—went up on the campus, and they were sited without regard to the Beaux-Arts plans that had guided the placement of new buildings in the campus core since the turn of the century. As the university made more changes, local preservationists protested, at first to campus demolitions, and then to new construction on the campus edges. But the recent turmoil over the school of public policy's expansion and its peaceful resolution may be a turning point in town-gown relations.

One of the first of its kind in the nation, U.C.-Berkeley's graduate school of public policy was founded in 1969 at its current location, in a house that the Beta Theta Pi fraternity built in 1893 and vacated in 1966 for larger quarters. The architect, Ernest Coxhead, here fused elements of the arts and crafts with a big-roofed, rusticated Tudor revival look, juxtaposing a range of materials—brick, stucco, slate, and wood shingles—into a picturesque building suggestive of several late-medieval buildings jumbled together. But the house is also well-mannered, even deferential, in its setting, and four or five minor additions through the years haven't altered Coxhead's concept.

The neighborhood that spreads into the hills behind the old frat house is rich in cultural context and architectural crosscurrents. For instance, around the time of World War I, middle-class Berkeley bohemian culture fermented on twisting Buena Vista Way, where Florence Treadwell Boynton, influenced by architect Bernard Maybeck and his developer wife, Annie, designed and built a house and Grecian pavilion she named the Temple of the Wings. Boynton instigated study circles on such topics as architecture, the garden, simple foods, dance, and poise, posture, and grace. She and Isadora Duncan, her childhood friend from Oakland, danced in the temple and performed Shakespeare's plays. Among those donning togas for Boynton's classical tableaux vivants was neighbor Charles Keeler, who with Maybeck helped establish the Hillside Club "to foster civic patriotism among the residents of Berkeley," as the founders put it. Maybeck, in turn, may have worked in Coxhead's office in 1893; a house that he designed for Keeler in 1893, destroyed in a 1923 northside Berkeley fire, resembled the Beta Theta Pi house.

The eccentric Maybeck was the architect of Berkeley's woodsy, wisteria-covered First Church of Christ, Scientist (Preservation, July/August 2001), four blocks south of the campus. Immediately behind Coxhead's frat house is a rambling, three-story shingled apartment house, designed in 1904 by John Galen Howard, Phoebe Hearst's architect for the mining building and author of the campus plan she commissioned. Coxhead, Maybeck, Howard, and Julia Morgan, who designed a little place down the coast at San Simeon for Phoebe Hearst's son, William, were among the architectural talents working in the seismically unstable, intellectually volatile Berkeley hills.

Almost a century later, the Richard & Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy—so named in 1998 for alumni donors—needed to expand beyond the Coxhead building. The Goldman School runs an academically elite two-year curriculum of theory and analysis in public policy; by sensitively inserting a new building into its own politically charged neighborhood, the school demonstrated itself capable of grappling with politics at the grassroots. Factors in this success are two professors of public policy at the school who did their homework. One, Michael O'Hare, who holds architecture and engineering degrees, wrote in 1986, "[O]ur physical surroundings…injure us if we mistreat them, and they confiscate our attention and restrict our options every waking minute even more implacably than the tax system takes our money." The other, Michael Nacht, became dean of the Goldman School in 1998 after three years of leading negotiations with Russia and China for the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Together, Nacht and O'Hare helped engineer public acceptance of the annex.

O'Hare and architects Aaron J. Hyland and Bruce D. Judd were my Goldman guides on a recent visit to Berkeley. Judd and Hyland are with Architectural Resources Group, the San Francisco firm that renovated the old Coxhead building in the mid-1990s and then designed the annex, and Judd is, coincidentally, a trustee of the National Trust. I immediately observed two undistinguished structures bracketing the old and new Goldman School buildings along steep Hearst Avenue: uphill, an old concrete parking garage crowding the former frat house, and downhill, a more recent five-story lump of an academic building called Soda Hall, covered in oversized greenish tiles and relevant to nothing within view. The garage predates Berkeley's preservation awareness, I later learned from Leslie Emmington of the nonprofit Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association. But BAHA did lead a vigorous fight against construction of Soda Hall in the early 1990s that pumped up the neighbors for the new battle in 1998, when the Goldman School proposed its annex.

The university controls the north frontage of Hearst Avenue for at least three blocks, and BAHA interprets that control as precedent-setting institutional encroachment into northside Berkeley. "Residents didn't care what the annex might look like or who it was for," Hyland said. "They just didn't want it."

One objection was that any new building would spoil the view of the old one. But, O'Hare pointed out, a line of evergreens that screened the parking lot where the new building eventually rose already hid the old building from some vantages. "If you stood on the LeRoy Avenue sidewalk, you saw the backs of cars peeking through the acacias," he said. And an oblique view of the Coxhead building from the corner of Hearst and LeRoy was partially screened by live oaks.

Parking was an issue. The annex would displace a surface lot, and those who considered parking the issue fell into two camps, according to O'Hare. "Some say the university has to build more parking so that people won't park in front of their houses, which people do, and others think the university should have less parking because it's not a good thing to drive and the only way to stop people from using their cars is to not give them a place to park. We had both comments very vigorously put." During construction, neighbors showed up every so often to caution construction workers not to harm the oaks' roots.

BAHA urged the school to move out of the Coxhead building and find an alternative site with room to expand. "We pointed out that the Goldman School could be expected to become a major force in American decision making," Emmington said, and that the two buildings wouldn't be sufficient for expected growth. BAHA then challenged a report written by the university in compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act. Threatening to sue, the nonprofit alleged destruction of the historic character of the Coxhead building and the open space next to it, as well as overbuilding the neighborhood.

"Most people agree that they would have lost in court," O'Hare said of BAHA's challenge. "But we would have spent a year in court, at least."

When the College of Engineering presented the idea of Soda Hall to the community a decade ago, its tactics were described as "decide, announce, and defend." In the Goldman School case, the architect and client opted for communication. They headed off rumors by setting up meetings and inviting the community. Architect Judd, who resides in Berkeley, was serving on BAHA's board of directors at the time, an affiliation the Goldman School looked on favorably. "That made it a little easier to talk to people, but [BAHA] is a very independently minded group of people," Judd said. "We started a dialogue early, were honest about what we were planning, and continually updated people as things changed. ‘It is no longer going to be a parking lot. This is what we have proposed and here is why we think we are mitigating the problem, and here is what we are actually going to do.'" They also showed the plans to the city's landmarks and design review committees, even though these groups had no real jurisdiction, and used a mailing list to reach a wider audience.

As the scheme was revealed, revised, and eventually shown as a model, some observers began to conclude that a new building, especially one that related to the old building, was a good idea after all. "The open corner made sense when you didn't have Soda Hall looming over this place, and it made sense when the space was not a parking lot," commented Harrison S. Fraker, dean of the U.C.-Berkeley College of Environmental Design. "The idea of maintaining and enhancing the residential street quality, at least on that side, seemed a real contribution to the historic structure."

Now that it is built, the Goldman School is a source of university pride. "There's a feeling that we did the right thing and that it paid off, for us and for community good will," said David J. Duncan of the university's capital projects staff.

The annex defers to its century-old companion building, with which it forms a pleasant courtyard on a plot that had been asphalt. The interior is about as efficient as one could imagine. Although early drawings show that cost cutting removed a balcony on the LeRoy Avenue facade and a setback and a bay on two prominent corners—all of which would have added interest—the exterior is textured and appealing. Altogether, the annex is a tight package of conservative architecture. The school, the university, and the community like it; Architectural Record, in search of innovation, will probably ignore it.

The Bay Area architects of a century ago experimented with design ideas and construction materials, and their buildings remain fresh and beautiful. The new annex has many of the still-valid attributes of the old frat house next door. But might not the community have gotten beyond the university's recent town-gown blunders and endorsed a new building in keeping with the innovative spirit—not just the style—of Berkeley's architectural golden era?

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