The design dialogue at Berkeley, the first of Yale's sixty-five year old residential colleges to undergo comprehensive renovations and alterations, is between the inevitability of change and necessity for permanence. Berkeley accepts and celebrates both the prior and new worlds, using new insertions -- be they artistic, programmatic, regulatory or technological in origin -- to draw constant comparison and conversation between a past artifact and a new potential.
by KieranTimberlake Associates LLP
The design dialogue at Berkeley, the first of Yale's sixty-five year old residential colleges to undergo comprehensive renovations and alterations, is between the inevitability of change and necessity for permanence. Berkeley accepts and celebrates both the prior and new worlds, using new insertions -- be they artistic, programmatic, regulatory or technological in origin -- to draw constant comparison and conversation between a past artifact and a new potential.
Student Activity and Student Services
Among all the diverse purposes of Berkeley College, these were the least anticipated in 1934. The way of life reflected in the "gentlemen's club" common room and servanted dining hall maintained its singular hold on student life for a relatively brief time, maybe ten years. Throughout the 1950s, '60s and '70s, extensive basement areas were annexed by quiet student warfare, reprogramming Berkeley with an alternative underground world of craft shops, laundry, game room, kitchen, buttery, exercise and computer rooms. Our job was to observe, reconfigure and reveal this alternative world. The reconfiguration ideal revolved around the assemblage of the independent beads of ad hoc use into two student activity centers. A two story multi-purpose room for theater, music, lectures, dance and basketball forms the heart of the South Activity Center. A cafe overlooks this space, with adjoining exercise, laundry, and kitchen areas. Glass and blackened steel partitions transform the prior opaque walls, rendering all activity -- be it craft, performance, recreation or study -- transparent. Our aesthetic intention here was to accept and lovingly restore the Old World Common and Dining Hall above, but juxtapose them against an equally intended, simultaneous New World of student activity below. The new skylighted monumental stair between levels, with its construction fence-like portal through to the Great Hall balcony beyond, coupled with a body-sized view portal to the new multi-purpose room at its base, gives physical substance to these parallel worlds.
Dining
In 1934, food was servant delivered from a small pantry with all students and Fellows eating the same thing at the same time. Today no one eats the same thing or at the same time and we all serve ourselves, but we still talk over food. The 1934 pantry has not been sufficient for decades to sustain a present day food program. A controversial part of the program has involved relocating much of the kitchen downstairs and expanding the former pantry both back into the kitchen and out into two vaulted alcoves at the end of the Great Hall, providing a new servery more than four times the size of the 1934 pantry. A new balcony and stair aesthetically contains and screens the expanded serving area from the Hall and it provides a semi-private dining room for use by student groups. The balcony and stair, as elements of the New World order at Berkeley, continue the dialogue of juxtaposition with the Old World Great Hall. New blackened steel rails and windows conceived as view portals between worlds provide substance to the constant comparison and acceptance of parallel worlds demanded of the viewer.
Student Rooms
The agents for change in student rooms are diverse, ranging from the regulatory environment to changing cultural expectations about acceptable levels of privacy, density and flexibility in group living. At Berkeley, code requirements and cultural expectations have combined to form an odd but happy couple. The necessity for secondary egress generates a pattern of alarmed pass through doors that address two social objectives. First, more privacy and less density in bedrooms is afforded through redesignation of some large former living rooms as bedrooms that are large enough to be furnished without bunk beds. Second, these new bedrooms are then appended to adjoining living rooms, forming larger suites that may be flexibly reconfigured in size from year-to-year, accommodating changing group size ranging from three to eight students.
Building Envelope
Like all buildings, Berkeley began to change the day it was completed. In addition to changes driven by program or need, taste and regulation, weather and human wear have been relentless. Without intervention nearly all buildings will ultimately stabilize about three feet above grade. At Berkeley, we have interfered with this natural process in three ways: repair, reconstitution and replacement, with each tactic lifting and restarting the cycle of degradation to a lesser or greater degree.
One technological triumph at Berkeley relates to the nearly two thousand leaded glass windows. While wondrous in their ever shifting fragmentation of light and view, these windows reflect a sixty-five year history of efforts to secure the rooms beyond from cold, draft and water. Nearly sixteen hundred of the original mass produced steel windows have been replaced with a custom engineered vented window. They are interior glazed and weatherstripped, complete with real leaded glass exterior panes and a fully integrated interior protective storm panel.
The alterations and renovations to Berkeley College strive to elevate the design dialogue about interventions in historic structures. Unlike older cultures, there is an increasing unease about change within the historic American structures. The alterations at Berkeley -- part art, part history, part science -- recognize architecture as an intergenerational event and seek a living as opposed to a museum relationship to the past.
Credits and Captions from Original Article
Project Name: Berkeley College Renovations, Yale University; Location: New Haven, Connecticut; Architect: Stephen Kieran, FAIA (Partner-in-Charge); James Timberlake, FAIA, Samuel Harris, PE, AIA, ESQ (Partners); Christopher Marcneal, AIA, Amelia Floresta, AIA, Associates-in-Charge; Steven Johns, Patreese Martin (Project Architects); KieranTimberlake Associates LLP; Staff: Ron Crawford, Clifton Fordham, Yves Gauthier, Kimberley Jones, Vanessa Keith, Catherine Moy, Lisa Neely, Alix Peck, Jane Pfaff, John Poros, Dana Reed, Marie Reichardt, Nicole Rittenour, Anne Roderer, Amanda Sachs, Jill Desimini, Janice Wang, Sarika Bajoria; Consultants: Lev Zetlin Associates (Civil, Mechanical, Electrical and Fire Protection); Robert Silman Associates, PC (Structural); Rolland / Towers, LLC (Landscape Architecture); Marguerite Rodgers, Ltd. (Furnishings & Interiors); Tigue Lighting, Inc. (Lighting Design); Bruce Siewak, AIA (Consulting Architect); Linbeck Construction Corporation (Construction Manager); Structure & Material: Glass and blackened steel partitions; Date of Completion: 1997.9; Photographer: Barry Halkin, Robert Benson and KieranTimberlake Associates; Photo Legends: Above: Campus View; First Floor Plan -- Berkeley South; 1 -- Servery; 2 -- Dining Hall; 3 -- Commons; 4 -- Library; 5 -- Master's House & Dean's Office; Longitudinal Section -- South; Far Left: View of the renovated multipurpose room.; Left: View of the multipurpose room, before renovation.; Above: Dining Hall and the adjoining common room restored as Great Hall, with new servery and balcony to the east.; Transverse Section -- Dining-East; Below: Dining Hall prior to renovation.; Right: View of the dining hall from the balcony.; Transverse Section -- Dining-West; Transverse Section -- Hall190C-East; Above: Vestibule Alcove of the new balcony and stairs.; Left Page: Common Room
© 1997– KieranTimberlake Associates LLP
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