Lower Sproul Redevelopment Planning

Dan J on February 19, 2024

At UC Berkeley, re-envisioning an outdated and underutilized mid-century student union facility presented the opportunity to rethink the nature of the public realm and its relevance to campus and community today, while creating a dynamic new 24/7 hub for student life. Moore Ruble Yudell’s master plan and feasibility study reinvents the new Student Community Center (SCC) as a state-of-the-art facility rooted in sustainable practices. Both new construction and adaptive reuse strategies combine to celebrate the legacy of the site and its history while modernizing its infrastructure into a flexible armature to better accommodate the evolving needs of future generations of students. The site included four building from the early 1960’s organized around a central plaza having special importance as the location where the Free Speech Movement began. Built in 1961, the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union framed a prominent campus gateway and an important site in the campus’s civil rights legacy, Sproul Plaza. The Union was intended as a bridge to the expansive Lower Sproul Plaza, which had struggled to establish a sense of place due to isolation from the surrounding campus and city fabric.

Joseph A Steger Student Life Center & Swift Hall

Dan J on February 19, 2024

The project leverages existing campus assets to dynamically revitalize a campus district. Designed around a new “Main Street” the plan creates a spine of campus activity organized around existing campus infrastructure, buildings and open spaces. The crescent-shaped Student Life Center carefully connects academic, retail, and social spaces for a diverse community of students, while fronting on historic McMicken Commons. Steger is linked to a renovated Swift Hall by a canopy-covered entrance plaza that serves as a major project entrance and campus gateway, where existing and new structures combine to create dynamic and historically integrated architecture. Critical to the success to this project is a clear interior circulation network integrating the ‘loft-like’ spaces in Steger with the more traditional Swift Hall. MRY carefully designed outdoor spaces surrounding the existing and new buildings to serve as student congregation spaces, supportive of the life within. In order to minimize visual impacts on historic Swift Hall, a new mechanical room was created below the entry plaza to serve both new and renovated space from a centralized location.

Henry A. and Elvira H. Jubel Hall

Dan J on November 19, 2023

Planned as a “building in the round”, Jubel Hall shapes a series of active outdoor spaces in concert with its neighbors. Ground-level uses encourage interaction and connectivity across arts and sciences. The building reinterprets traditional Collegiate Gothic Architecture in a more open and contemporary expression, so that it maintains a dialogue with its traditional neighbors to the north and the contemporary buildings to the south.

As the new home of the Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science within the McKelvey School of Engineering, Jubel Hall provides a range of new state-of-the-art research spaces across four levels. Flexible loft-like maker space and laboratories are complemented by shared social and collaborative spaces to foster interdisciplinary collaboration, student engagement and community connectivity.

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