The completed alterations and renovations at Berkeley College strive to elevate the design dialogue about interventions in historic structures. Unlike other cultures, there is an increasing unease about change within historic American structures. The alterations at Berkeley - part art, part history, part science - recognize architecture as an intergenerational event and seek a living rather than a museum relationship to the past.
The completed alterations and renovations at Berkeley College strive to elevate the design dialogue about interventions in historic structures. Unlike other cultures, there is an increasing unease about change within historic American structures. The alterations at Berkeley - part art, part history, part science - recognize architecture as an intergenerational event and seek a living rather than a museum relationship to the past.
Student Activity and Student Services
Among all the diverse purposes of Berkeley College, student activity and student services 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 1950's, 60's and 70's, extensive basement areas were annexed by quiet student warfare, reprogramming Berkeley with an alternative underground world of craft shops, laundry, game room, kitchen, snack bar, exercise and computer rooms. Our intention was to observe, reconfigure and reveal this alternative world. The ideal reconfiguration required assemblage of the independent ad-hoc use into two student activity centers. A two story multi-purpose room for theater, music, lectures, dance and basketball, created from a former squash court, 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 former opaque walls, rendering all activity - be it craft, performance, recreation or study - transparent. Our aesthetic intention here was to carefully 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 skylit monumental stair between levels, with its head-sized view portal through to the new 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. A controversial aspect of the work 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 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 insertions, 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 old and new worlds demanded of the user.
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. The necessity for secondary egress generates a pattern of alarmed pass through doors that addresses two social objectives. First, more privacy and less density in bedrooms is afforded through redesignation of some large living rooms as bedrooms that are now of a size that they may 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 groups ranging from three to eight students.
Building Envelope
Without intervention nearly all buildings will ultimately stabilize about three feet above grade. In this project, 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. While wondrous in their ever shifting fragmentation of light and view, Berkeley's 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 pressure-equalized window. They are interior glazed and weatherstripped, complete with real leaded glass exterior panes and a fully integrated interior protective storm panel. The appreciation of real leaded art glass remains, but with the performance of a 21st century glazing system.
© 1997– KieranTimberlake
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