John Galen Howard

UC Berkeley just put up a neat slideshow of architectural renderings, drawings and photographs of their campus, focusing on the legacy of John Galen Howard. Howard was a Beaux Arts-trained designer who helped spawn the regional "Bay Area Eclectic" style in the Berkeley hills.

I grew up hanging out in an office in a building designed by Howard, the old Architecture School. Most of his work for the campus was neoclassical and of stone, but North Gate Hall was a graceful shingled building which followed the grade up the slope of Hearst Avenue. The old drafting rooms, now newsrooms, were lit by fantastic expanses of skylights and walls of windows - a reminder of when natural light was a neccesity for drawing and not the glare-inducing impediment to CRT legibility it is now.