A Machine in the Garden [Two Place Tales]

A Machine in the Garden Richard Oliver Wurster Hall was successor to the Ark, a gentle, wood- shingled building designed by John Galen Howard that had first housed the College of Architecture. Richard Oliver began his studies there and completed them in Wurster. We have asked him to reflect upon the influence of the two settings. When the students of the College of Environmental Design (CED) returned to the campus in the fall of 1964, we attended classes in a new building. We had left the familiar qualities of the Ark and the T buildings for the new setting of Wurster Hall. For those of us who were planning to graduate the following spring, the move was particularly full of anticipation and trepidation. Almost 20 years later, this is one person's account of what we think we found and what we imagine we left behind. Until the summer of 1964, the center of the C E D was the A r k , a modest, wood- framed, shingle-sided building placed on a knoll along the north edge of campus at the Euclid Avenue entrance. The building, which wrapped around a brick-paved courtyard, held a lecture hall, jury room, library, administrative offices, shop, and only enough studio space for graduate students and seniors. These rooms were placed along a broad, light-filled, L-shaped hallway that followed the lay of the land—flat around the courtyard, a cascade of steps rising along the knoll—an abstract topography that fused the building to its site. The jury room occupied the preeminent position, placed at the end of the hallway, at the summit of the stairs. It is astonishing to consider that all those facilities were fitted into a building that seemed like a large house—or perhaps a modest temple. Stair of the O l d A r k , University of California, Berkeley. College of Environ­ mental Design Document Collection, University of California, Berkeley. Places/Volume I, Number 4