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Worth the Wait
A year after beginning their exile in the Tower Parkway “swing dorm,” the students of Berkeley College are back home—and their renovated buildings are the envy of the College.
by Mark Alden Branch ’86
November 1999
The lines have been long at the Berkeley College dining hall this fall—so long that the managers have imposed limits on diners from other colleges. It’s not the food; Berkeley has the same offerings as its counterparts. What’s attracting non-Berkeleyites is the renovated dining hall. Not only has the great hall itself been restored, air-conditioned, and relighted (and a new balcony added to provide a semi-private dining area), but the food service area has been enlarged and reorganized to make getting a meal easier and more pleasant. “People keep saying, ‘It may be the same food, but it sure looks better here,’” says architect Stephen Kieran '73.
Berkeley’s $35 million overhaul—funded in part by a gift from Robert Bass '71 and his wife Anne—is just the first taste of an ongoing program to bring the Depression-era colleges up to date. (Branford is being renovated this year; Saybrook will be next.) The agenda is exhaustive: The buildings are getting new mechanical and electrical systems, their façades are being cleaned and repointed, student rooms are being reconfigured to allow more flexible housing choices, and basement areas are being “reprogrammed” for student activities.
In Berkeley, it is the last change that is the most visible. Kieran and his Philadelphia firm, Kieran, Timberlake & Harris, looked at what he calls the “alternative underground world” that students created in the college’s basement after World War II. The architects redesigned the subterranean space as a more consciously conceived student activity area, with windows connecting the various rooms visually. At the south end of the college, a new “monumental stair” was carved out of a space formerly used for a cloakroom, connecting the formal common room and dining hall upstairs with the more casual spaces below. Those include the college buttery, a private kitchen for students who want to try their hands at cooking, a weight room, a laundry room, and a high ceilinged multi-purpose room that was created by combining two squash courts. The idea, Kieran says, was to concentrate social activities at the south end of the college, while more solitary pursuits such as woodworking and music practice are pursued at the north end.
The renovation plans were not unanimously applauded. A group of professors and preservationists objected to the insertion of the balcony into the alcoves at the dining hall, saying its modern character was at odds with the space. But functionally, the balcony has proven to be a success. For his part, Kieran saw the balcony as part of the evolving life of the college, much as the lower-level renovations reflect the changes in use that students have imposed over the years. “Architecture at its best,” he concludes, “is an intergenerational event.”  |
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