Since the 1890s, when a building and financial boom brought a new group of mostly eastern architects into the area, the San Francisco Bay Area has been a center for innovative and influential architecture and environmental design. UC Berkeley has been at the heart of this creativity since Bernard Maybeck began instruction in architecture in 1894, training architects, hiring them to teach or design its buildings, or inviting them for lectures, critiques and exhibitions. When President Benjamin Ide Wheeler formally established the Department of Architecture in 1903, he appointed John Galen Howard to be its head and the first Professor of Architecture. Howard immediately started the Architecture Library with a gift of $5,000 from Phoebe Apperson Hearst. This was the first university architecture program and library west of St. Louis.
Most of the influential architects in the Bay Area have been associated with Berkeley's Architecture Department. From this extraordinary mixture of pioneering architects and their diverse and broad views of design evolved the UC Berkeley Architecture Department, which influenced the direction of both the study and practice of design in the Bay Area and beyond, and which helped shape a distinct regional style. The history of the Architecture Department is also a history of the development of the profession of architecture as practiced in the Bay Area, of architectural education on the West Coast, and the architecture and planning of the Berkeley campus, as well as the history of the built environment of Northern California, which forged a unique link between the American Arts and Crafts aesthetic and European Modernism.
230 Wurster Hall #1820
Berkeley, CA, US , 94720-1820
