About the workbooks

Architecture is both a lens into and a product of mutable cultural forces. Berkeley Architecture asks students to situate their work at the intersection of these forces and imagine human activity, material specificity and spatial potentialities. 

UC Berkeley’s first architecture classes were taught in 1903. Later, in 1959, the College of Environmental Design was established initiating, in an academic setting, a necessity for collaboration among architects, landscape architects, and urban planners. The department today is composed of leading architects, artists, historians, engineers, theorists and sociologists dedicated to the notion that the challenges facing the built environment demand interdisciplinary labor and experimentation rooted in artistic, social, and ecological values.

The college is located in the San Francisco Bay Area where students and faculty are influenced and inspired by the region’s rich history and diverse peoples. Even so, students have ample opportunity to experience and learn from other locations as exemplified by recent excursions to Germany, Mexico, Singapore, and China to name but a few. We believe the juncture of global and local is critical to understanding architecture’s positions in the landscape of current ethical and ecological concerns. Of equal importance, our department attracts students from the US and all over the world who participate in lectures, seminars and work on projects from the intensely fundamental to the provocatively speculative. This pamphlet is but a brief glimpse into the thoughts and workings of Berkeley students and faculty, yet offers the promise of architecture futures imaginatively examined.

 

2017 Undergraduate Student Workbook

2017 Graduate Student Workbook