Hearst Memorial Mining Building - History

History

Construction of the Hearst Memorial Mining Building began in 1902, and the building was completed in 1907, with a dedication ceremony held on August 23rd of that year. The $1,065,000 construction cost was a gift of Phoebe Apperson Hearst, dedicated to the memory of her late husband, Senator George Hearst, who had made much of his fortune in mining.

When construction began in 1903, the College of Mines, with its 247 students (or 11% of the total student population at the university) was the largest of its kind in the world. The college did not have a dedicated building, and due to the size of the college, the Hearst Memorial Mining Building was chosen as the first building under the Hearst Plan to be constructed.

University architect John Galen Howard designed the building with the assistance of the Dean of the College of Mines, Professor Samuel B. Christy and UC Berkeley-educated architect Julia Morgan. The architects set out to create a building that harmonized classical elements with architectural innovation, building off prior examples of European and American mining building architecture, and staying true to the Beaux-Arts style that defined Howard's vision for the Hearst campus plan. In order to help them realize this vision, Hearst funded a trip for Howard and Christy to visit mining schools throughout the United States and Europe so that they could study standardized architectural forms for mining schools, as libraries and hospitals had realized in their own architectural evolution. Howard and Christy did not find many examples of mining colleges--the majority of the buildings they visited were originally built for other purposes. Howard feared that the scant number examples to study would make his design prone to the mistakes of an architectural form early in its evolution. This problem is what inspired Howard to create an “elastic” design--the building’s exterior shell would be built separate from the interior, so that the interior could be modified in the future without having to scrap the shell or compromise the building's strength. Vents and chimneys were also built independent of the shell, as these architectural features were expected to have shorter lifespans than the exterior structure. California Hall, another Howard-designed building on the UC Berkeley campus was also constructed with an “elastic” interior form.

Howard, reflecting upon their work after the construction was complete, said:

We have sought to secure beauty not by easy masquerade and putting on of architectural stuff, but by organic composition, working from within out, and letting the heart of the thing speak...If the expression be true, no matter how strange it may seem at first, in the end it must be seen to be inevitable.