Morris Adjmi Architects' new Helen Diller Anchor House student housing project has debuted on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. 

The project is a resource meant to house transfer students who are a vital part of the UC system and more likely to be first-generation college students from low-income backgrounds than their peers. Anchor House has ample space for their transition with 772 beds at 450,650 square feet. Its construction was funded entirely through the Helen Diller Family Foundation, helping the university towards its 9,000-bed goal to end a housing crisis that has persisted for almost a decade.

Adjmi’s team situated the mixed-use development, which offers 11,500 square feet of ground-level retail space to non-related dorm establishments like a bookstore and fitness center that help fund its maintenance and scholarships for students, in a prime gateway location adjacent to the western edge of campus. 

The program for Anchor House includes the 8,600-square-foot fitness center, a culinary classroom, makerspace, small libraries, communal kitchen, bike shop, and rooftop vegetable garden all arranged around a central courtyard framed on either side by open terraces and vertical landscaping. The courtyard, which offers relief from urban heat island effects, features a parabolic landscape element made from repurposed bricks recovered from the former bus depot on its site.

Each of the private 244 studio to four-bedroom apartments inside has fully operable 7’x7’ windows with a full kitchen and selection of luxury built-in furnishings and finishes. 

Finally, the building is clad in a grayscale palette of bricks (a return to the material for Adjmi after the Italianate-inspired The Grand Mulberry and other residential designs) that combine with the gridded, aluminum-framed fenestration to create an "elevated" modern appearance across all 14 building stories. 

Construction took two years to complete after commencing in February of 2022. The building was inaugurated this August as classes commenced for the new fall semester. The firm says it will achieve LEED Gold certification requirements, as well as Scope 1 and 2 Carbon Neutrality by 2025 and Scope 3 by 2050 to meet the climate emergency.