trangely enough, many of you tossers have asked me, of all people, how is the architecture programme here at Berkeley's College of Environmental Design, which also includes the departments of city and regional planning and landscape architecture. Since I had only completed the undergraduate architecture programme (I'm currently in the middle of graduate M. Arch. programme), I can only impart to you my experiences as an insignificant undergrad. First of all, the school reflects the wonderful diversity of the Berkeley campus and the surrounding community: people from all backgrounds and with a wide range of opinions. However, in terms of ethnicity, East Asians and Asian-Americans from California seem to be somewhat disproportionately well-represented among undergraduates in the architecture programme. Diversity of the student body is more balanced at the graduate level; there you get a more interesting mix of people from all parts of the country and from around the world. Fortunately, no particular school of thought dominates CED; almost all views, beliefs, perspectives, outlooks, dogmas, and aesthetic sensibilities can be accommodated, studied, discussed, or generally represented in one way or another. Whether you're a New Urbanist or a Sci-Arc wannabe, you'll fit right in. (This would include even those of noted Professor Emeritus Christopher Alexander and his fervent disciples of the Pattern Language. Admittedly, to follow the teachings of Alexander and his distinct coterie of acolytes is like joining a cult, and is viewed as such by the rest of the department.) In the end, everyone gets a chance to find his comfortable niche. This is now more so than ever due to recent waves of faculty departures and retirements and to the arrival of new instructors who replace the former. The faculty is in flux. We even have a new dean, Harrison Fraker, who seems rather energetic. Convincing potential donors seems to be what he's best at. Sustainability in design has also been reinforced. Whether he's the right guy to constructively address the concerns of the student body remains to be seen. The College is in the process of changing.

owever, the admittedly clueless undergrads do often get shafted due to large and overcrowded classes (many quite hard to get into) and some indifferent instructors and starchitects who care more about their professional goals, their research, or their precious coteries of pet graduate student brown-nosers. It's not entirely their fault. As expected in large universities, it's publish or perish here, and teaching often takes a back seat. Nonetheless, I would love to see an undergrad try and actually get into one of their office hours and be taken seriously. Fortunately, not all professors are like that, and some are extremely dedicated to teaching (even to the extent of compromising their tenure track). Like all other undergrads at Cal, the students of CED must not be passive in order to get a worthwhile education. They must be absolutely serious with their education as well as tenacious and persistent, especially when dealing with professors, instructors, lab monitors, and administrators. Furthermore, they must be very patient when dealing with the long lines and Indian bureaucracies at the University administration level. (Yeah, I'm also talking about you, Tele-Bears.) Unfortunately, they should also be able to accept defeat sometimes and the fact that things don't often turn out the way we want them to. More often than not, students must at one point or another give up trying to get into a particular course simply because it is too crowded. Since some courses are not offered every semester, summer school and an extended college career are common and necessary options here at Cal.

he undergraduate curriculum strikes a good balance between the theoretical / artistic aspects of architecture and the professional / practical concerns. The building science courses are highly recommended. Structures courses are rigourous but cool. The history courses are very solid with great teachers like Tobriner, James, and Upton. One of the great CED traditions is studying for the 170A and 170B architecture history finals. You and your buddies (or preferably anybody who was actually awake and alert and taking copious notes during the lectures) camp out at night for as long as it takes on the third floor of Wurster Hall, whose corridors are aligned with hundreds of prints of significant works of architecture covered in class during the course of the semester. Together through discussions and impromptu review sessions, you and your classmates try to recollect and work out the significance as well as the historical stats of the subject of each print.

he studio courses vary. Sometimes you're lucky; sometimes you're not. Essentially you can do whatever you want here as long as you can justify it. Unlike Columbia or UCLA, they wouldn't laugh at you if you incorporate a traditional pitched roof into your design. They even believe in right angles here. However, the school doesn't necessarily teach you basic skills such as lettering, draughting, set organisation, and detailing either. I myself feel ambivalent whether teaching practical tasks belong in an undergraduate curriculum. It's basically sort of sink or swim around here. Don't expect nursemaiding or hand-holding. Not suprisingly, many would often find themselves graduating without some basic skills taken for granted at architectural firms. An undergraduate curriculum supplemented by internships or summer jobs certainly helps. In the end, there are indeed wonderful, caring, and talented professors and staff members around here who are more than willing to help, but you just have to track them down, grab them, and don't ever let them go. Your success here eventually depends on you.

n terms of facilities and resources, CED is relatively well-endowned despite its being a seismically unsound building. (Major forthcoming seismic retrofit and remodelling of the building has been promised by the University.) The specialised research labs and the library are generally well-run and more than decent. As a matter of fact, the library features an impressive collection as well as a usually very helpful and intelligent staff. However, its limited hours are quite ridiculous due to impending budget cuts (which may soon even threaten the number of journal subscriptions). The architecture slide library remains an important resource for research, teaching, and presentations. The woodworking / metal shop is also pretty impressive, and unfortunately, it too has limited hours of operation. (The very competent woman who runs the shop, Denise Rush, may initially seem to be a bit intimidating, and her attitude is beyond grating. She simply won't allow you to do anything stupid. However, in the end, it's better to be screamed at than to lose a limb (or worse) in a grisly industrial accident.) You don't have an excuse not to build awesome scale models in this school. You should also be friends with Joe Gouig, the in-house audio-visual technician and miracle-worker; he can make your life at CED easier in so many ways. Another great benefit of attending CED is that the disciplines of planning and landscape architecture are all in the same building. It's enrichring, rewarding, and most of all, easy to pick the brains of the students and professors from these related disciplines. Each CED department also hosts a lecture series each semester that's also open to the public. The architecture series in particular usually draws plenty of A-list starchitects, and it has become an important fixture for the Bay Area architectural community. Taking classes from the other CED departments (it's actually required) would definitely make your architectural education so much more complete and rewarding. On the other hand, computing at the College remains a serious problem, and the College seems to make life utterly hell for students, particularly those in architecture.

irst of all, the hardware themselves are fairly decent, but all the machines are still unable to meet the high demands during the busy daytime hours. Be prepared to come and work during the middle of night when the labs aren't as crowded. When many projects are due at the same time (as they often do), the labs become a nightmare; they're crowded around the clock. During the crunch period, there are always going to be some wankers hoarding up the machines continuously for days when they render their enormous graphic files. Furthermore, one of the biggest drawbacks here is the fact that the computing facilities are actually separated from the design studios where most students spend their time. Needless to say, this makes working and designing ridiculously tedious. Students here have to find and devise crazy ways to work and produce without computers (which in this modern day and age is rather scandalous). As if being separated from the studios are not enough, the plotters are actually located in yet another part of the building that is a ridiculously long trek away from the workstations. Trying to obtain plots at CED involve utterly nightmarish, Kafka-esque scenarios. I'm not exaggerating. To retrieve the output from the plotters, students would have to trek to the photo lab first in order to get someone to unlock the door to the output room (located elsewhere in Wurster) where the plotters are actually located. You would also need to go to the photo lab beforehand to purchase an output card that gets debited to with each plotter output. To make things worse (as if it's still possible), the photo lab is only open during certain hours, so you can't get plots during the night. Are you following all this shit? I certainly can't. Needless to say, this stupid and time-consuming setup is more than enough to drive students crazy. Unfortunately, computers and plotters in the studios remain a dream that's far, far away. Don't even get me started about the utter incompetence of certain computing staff members. Wait, wait, there's more! Believe it or not, here's a real story: CED is shutting down its criminally neglected UNIX system because, according to the staff, they can't provide adequate security against hackers. That is like saying I'm getting rid of my car and I'm not going to drive anymore because I can't find ways to secure against theft.

here are plenty of other features you can appreciate though. Named after the Californian modernist architect William Wurster and his wife Catherine, Wurster Hall (Demars, Esherick & Olsen, 1964) itself is a very didactic with its rational brutalist design with exposed HVAC systems and plywood partitions for non-load-bearing walls. You really get a good sense of how the building is put together. It's an architect's building in the sense that it takes an architect to appreciate it. Unfortunately, visitors to the Berkeley campus are often told by ignorant tour guides (who probably use a script) that it's ironic how the architecture department is housed in the ugliest building on campus. In reality, it's far from being the ugliest building on campus, and those guides don't know what they're talking about. Being architecturally clueless, they criticise it for the wrong reasons. Wurster may be a badly constructed, seismically dangerous bastard of a building with horrendous circulation and space planning problems, but it's our fucking bastard, and they don't have a fucking right to talk about it like that. To some people, it's home.

rchitectural studios are housed on floors five through nine in the Wurster tower, which features admittedly wonderful views of the Bay Area. While students practically live here during their stint at CED, they are generally uninspiring and spartan spaces, furnished only with battered chairs, ancient draughting tables, and stools. The relentless ugliness of the tower studios is one of Wurster Hall's biggest design flaws. However, there is an advantage to working in such an ostensibly despairing environment. You're not afraid to make a mess while experimenting with various artistic mediums, since the place already looks like a dump. It also prompts students to do absolutely whatever they can to personalise their spaces to make them bearable. They bring in rugs, sofas, lamps, and whatever they can think of to make the place feel like home. Like architecture studios anywhere else, the sounds of ABBA often drift through the draughting tables, and you're never too far from a skanky old couch that you're always too tired to refuse. Feel free to install art wherever you feel appropriate. This may partly be the reason why the stairwells and bathrooms are entirely covered in three decades plus worth of graffiti, and what some choose to believe as art. Again, students wouldn't feel inhibited to create serious messes that are the effects of intense design and production processes. Feel free to spray mount or paint wherever your classmates are not close by. You certainly are not desecrating the studios since they already look like shit and are covered in shit. No matter what you do to or inflict on the studios, the spaces would be just as ugly anyway. However, perhaps the most troubling aspect of the studios is that they are prone to rampant theft and vandalism like the rest of Berkeley. Beacuse anything can be stolen (e.g., stereos, CDs, books, draughting equipment, and even design projects), remember to lock everything. Almost no one goes through his stint here without having something valuable of his get stolen. Evidence seems to suggest that most CED thefts are inside jobs; your fellow students may be the ones who are screwing you. Again, lock and hide anything and everything in the studios. All things considered, Wurster life is cruel but so fucking cool. All the shit notwithstanding, the camaraderie that develops in the large undergrad studios and the coffee from nearby Caffe Strada would eventually overcome all the bullshit that one endures: even the haughty, artsy-fartsy grad students, the snooty professors, and the seemingly indifferent University bureaucracy. Also remember that cultivating a nicotine or pot habit can do wonders for your social life at Wurster. Don't let the bastards get to you.

October 1996 (with subsequent revisions)

Achtung! More stories about life in Berkeley can be found throughout these pages, particularly the following entries: 28 February 2000, 16 August 2001, 01 September 2002, and 15 October 2006.