page_title: Hearst Memorial Mining Building
section_title: Symbolism
hierarchical_section_title: Hearst Memorial Mining Building / History / Symbolism
caption_attribution_description: John Galen Howard (1864-1931), American architect who designed some of the initial buildings for the University of California, Berkeley.
context_page_description: The Hearst Memorial Mining Building at the University of California, Berkeley, is home to the university's Materials Science and Engineering Department, with research and teaching spaces for the subdisciplines of biomaterials; chemical and electrochemical materials; computational materials; electronic, magnetic, and optical materials; and structural materials. The Beaux-Arts-style Classical Revival building is listed in the National Register of Historic Places and is designated as part of California Historical Landmark #946. It was designed by John Galen Howard, with the assistance of the UC Berkeley-educated architect Julia Morgan and the Dean of the College of Mines at that time, Samuel B. Christy. It was the first building on that campus designed by Howard. Construction began in 1902 as part of the Phoebe Hearst campus development plan. The building was dedicated to the memory of her husband George Hearst, who had been a successful miner.
  From 1998 to 2003, the building underwent a massive renovation, expansion, and seismic retrofit, in which a platform was built underneath the building, and a suspension system capable of up to 1 meter lateral travel was installed.
context_section_description: Howard gave the building a brusk, industrial aesthetic as a complement to the softer aesthetic of the other buildings in the Hearst Plan. Howard referred to the Mining Building as "the kind, bluff brother amid a bevy of lovely sisters". These architectural features were also intended to communicate the function of the building. In an interview with the University of California Magazine in 1902, 5 years before the building's dedication ceremony, Howard reflects:
  The aim has been to give expression to the character of a College of Mining Engineering as distinguished from one of Art, Letters, or of Natural Science. The expression of belles-lettres in architecture demands a more purely classic character than that of scientific studies. Such a building as a library, for instance, may without inconsistency rejoice in all the sumptuous glories of Roman architecture or the Renaissance; the tradition of the world leads on naturally enough in this direction. But ... such delicate and highly organized motives find little place in a Mining Building, which demands a treatment, while no less beautiful, much more primitive, less elaborately developed in the matter of detail, less influenced by the extreme classic tradition either as a canon of proportion or as an architectonic schema. The profession of mining has to do with the very body and bone of the earth; its process is a ruthless assault upon the bowels of the world, a contest with the crudest and most rudimentary forces. There is about it something essentially elementary, something primordial; and its expression in architecture must, to be true, have something of the rude, the Cyclopean. The emotion roused must be a sense of power, rather than that of grace ... To produce a design for a Mining Building which shall in all sincerity express its purpose and at the same time harmonize with future buildings quite as sincere in the expression of their purposes--purposes in almost every case of greater amenity--this has been the aim of the architect in approaching his task in its artistic phase.
caption: John Galen Howard 1886
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