Collected Memories of Evans Hall

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Berkeley’s Evans Hall is unmitigatably ugly, inside and out, even at a great distance; to the discerning student, Evans is the ugliest structure on campus. Last week The Daily Californian reported it’s to be demolished as part of the University’s 2021 Long Range Development Plan. This news is a long time coming. As the Daily Californian and SFGATE articles discuss, Evans has been widely disliked since it was built to Gardner Dailey’s design in 1971. The University floated a proposal to demolish Evans, and build a complex of low buildings on the site, in 2000; they punted that decision, citing budgetary constraints and a long line of competing seismic priorities.1 Now Evans is on the docket again: it’s just unacceptably bad to look at. This perspective is true, but it elides a deeper reading of the value in buildings. There’s a sort of memory in Evans Hall itself: of institutional dehumanization; of the studentry’s miniature ingenuity; of milestones, and major pests, in computer science

Collected Memories of Evans Hall << blog 2022-02-13 Berkeley’s Evans Hall is unmitigatably ugly, inside and out, even at a great distance; to the discerning student, Evans is the ugliest structure on campus. Last week The Daily Californian reported it’s to be demolished as part of the University’s 2021 Long Range Development Plan. This news is a long time coming. As the Daily Californian and SFGATE articles discuss, Evans has been widely disliked since it was built to Gardner Dailey’s design in 1971. The University floated a proposal to demolish Evans, and build a complex of low buildings on t

Collected Memories of Evans Hall

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