C.V. Starr East Asian Library

Tod Williams and Billie Tsien unveil a quiet box full of surprises with the C.V. Starr East Asian Library.

By Josephine Minutillo

For decades, the University of California, Berkeley had a well-deserved reputation as a place for radical ideas and progressive culture. But these days, its wooded campus—nestled along the rolling eastern shore of San Francisco Bay—is less a hotbed of political activism than a bucolic backdrop for nurturing some of the country’s brightest students. And when it comes to campus architecture, the university’s all-powerful Board of Regents has become increasingly conservative. For the C.V. Starr East Asian Library, located at the campus’s Classical core, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects faced an unyielding set of design constraints, imposed on the project well into the more than decade-long effort to get it realized.

Like much of the work of Williams, FAIA, and Tsien, AIA, the rigid geometry and weighty mass of the library’s exterior is mediated by a thoughtful interplay of materials. But unlike the contemporary compositions of their earlier buildings, this new one, by mandate, recalls another era. The four-story structure subtly unites Asian influences with an overriding Neoclassicism that defines much of the Berkeley campus.

The New York–based architects frequently found themselves in California during the early 1990s as construction progressed on their acclaimed Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla. It was then that they were initially hired to design the first freestanding building for East Asian studies at Berkeley, considered one of the country’s premier East Asian teaching and research institutions. After several years, and changes to the program and site, the project seemed permanently stalled. The death in 2002 of Berkeley’s beloved former chancellor, Chang-Lin Tien, sparked renewed interest in the project and spurred fund-raising efforts to at long last build such a facility.

During the intervening years, the university would adopt what it calls The New Century Plan, a highly prescriptive set of guidelines for new campus construction. The library’s location on Memorial Glade—the campus’s main quadrangle—made its design subject to heightened scrutiny. Initial schemes were scrapped to conform to the new plan, which dictated the building’s rectangular form; its white granite cladding; its pitched, Mission clay tile roof; and its coplanar siting with respect to the adjacent McLaughlin Hall, among other things. “We followed the rules,” Tsien, recalls. “But we broke the rules also.”

The large bronze screens that adorn the library’s main facades, for instance, adhere to a symmetrical ideal consistent with the building’s prominent neighbors, including the imposing, Beaux-Arts Doe Library and the symbolic campanile of Sather Tower (scene of many Vietnam-era protests), both built nearly a century ago on the opposite side of the quad. What they conceal, however, is an irregular arrangement of windows, which only become visible at night when the metal panels turn into a golden veil. The screen—an important component of Asian architecture—represents the building’s Asian mission. Its overall design further alludes to traditional Asian elements: A cracked-ice motif on the 15-foot-tall lower grille is topped by a vertical bamboo pattern on the 17-foot-tall upper grille along the library’s southern elevation, which faces those early-20th-century campus icons.

Cast in Hangzhou, China, at an installed cost of $1 million, the fate of the screens—another 32-foot-tall screen graces the narrower west facade, while a smaller, 21-foot-tall version featuring only the bamboo motif marks the building’s entrance at the east facade—was not always a sure thing. “We had to step outside the procurement box to get them approved,” says Rob Gayle, AIA, U.C. Berkeley’s associate vice chancellor of capital projects. “We’ve never incorporated such a large, custom-made, international building component like this on a campus building before.”

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