Berkeley's Newman Hall and its muted grey 30-foot-high windowless, free-standing concrete walls sits like a massive bear on its haunches would on the corner of College Avenue and Dwight Way.
The building's set back from the street some, but its blunt, overwhelmingly two-dimensional, barefaced and supple exterior grabs your attention; at the lip of the Berkeley hills before the land accelerates to the ridge above, the structure anchors, in your mind, southeast Berkeley with its Greek houses, its student living towers, its two-story rental houses.
Just a few blocks from Cal, it's planted as one big, welcome clog in the artery of College Avenue's headwaters; College, which begins at Cal's south border, is the easternmost heartline of Berkeley's north-south traffic, the correspondent (all parallel) of Telegraph, Shattuck, MLK, Sacramento and San Pablo to the west. Above (east of) College, the upscale, convoluted neighborhoods fade out into the narrow ridge that separates the Bay Area from the inland countryside, shadowed, powerfully, by Mount Diablo a few miles away. As College tumbles headlong at a slight decline, basically running due south, it approaches the charming Berkeley/Oakland interchange, announced quietly by a large rectangular green sign, "Welcome to Oakland; pop. 409,300, elev. 42 Feet," heavily shaded by sidewalk maple trees and an energy-burst of boutique businesses, all in a row: Wood Tavern (woody, taverny restaurant), La Farine Bakery (see the chocolate croissant post), a flower shop, an upscale grocery, and then Cole's Coffee.
Like BAM (see 11.08.10 post), Newman Hall was designed by Mario Ciampi and stands, interestingly, just a few blocks south of the museum (which is just west of College on Bancroft Ave.). The two structures are remarkably similar, primarily in their boldfaced bare concrete walls, which provide a framework like bone of a fleshless body, that bleed through both both buildings - similar massive, poured, segmented concrete blocks serve at once as interior and exterior. The most stunning aspect of the building is subliminal, however. You know there's something eerily familiar about the texture of the vertical, irregularly spaced grooves that run down the concrete-grey 30-foot tall, massive walls. The sightline up the building's facade is slightly disjointed by the offset stacking, edge-over-edge, of three similarly grooved equal-height (10-foot high) segments. The building's structure, consciously and unconsciously, sings in your mind when you recognize the similarity, harmony, dialogue, conjuration with the six-tree grove of redwoods that stand, symmetrically, 10 feet from the Dwight-College intersection, at once shading and introducing the Center's entrance which ducks about 30 feet behind the grove at a diagonal before straightening to parallel Dwight and College on either side. A couple of redwoods, about 120 feet down College at the far end of the Center's bordering monolithic wall, complete the complementary impression.
The rhythm and texture of the concrete's grooves suggest it was carved by slow, persistent, trickling runnels of rain; an even more powerful impression emerges from its offset, irregular furrows, which call up the nature-crafted, ancient, deep rusty, ruddy spongy gold of redwood bark. In that realization, the concrete grey becomes both a canvas and a mirror for the sun-filtered red-green gold of redwoods. Stunning.
Inside the chapel, the back wall of which is the same free-standing 120-foot long wall bordering College Avenue on the outside, the concrete is grooved as well, but has a different effect, not as elemental or environmental. It creates a dominating two-dimensional sensation as if the back wall is a placemat unrolled. The grooves and the overwhelming 2-D impression create a sense of flight, an elevation, a lacy green sky-gaze, the sensation you get from resting your chin on the soft, light bark of a redwood's trunk and staring upward along its grooves hundreds of feet into the air, ending in sky and flight. Inside, the lack of color envelopes you and enhances the imagination's more glorious, multidimensional completion.
The consequent Mass I wish I could say matched the space's glory. The round priest seemed a bit off balance, more from disinterest or boredom than from intoxication, though that could've been the case, too. The Catholic experience reminded me of a previous life, one involving a Catholic formation house at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas, a Holy Cross school, sister of Notre Dame, the source of my B.S. and first M.A. The youngish (40-ish) director of the live-in program, a Holy Cross Brother, from Baton Rouge, wonderfully Cajun, drank seven and sevens (w/ Seagram's Seven, no doubt) every night. But he was cool. More than once, he recounted his experience as a teacher at a Catholic high school in Louisiana, in particular regarding a test question he gave on his final in some type of a Catholic religion class. His principle test question went something like: "What is the Church?" And his point, paraphrased was, "Anything involving a building, a document or a ritual was wrong. It's about the people." And, undoubtedly, that's true. There're not many occurrences in life of the right person and the right time coming together at the right place. Relationships are the only thing that's real, and when they go right, the world goes right; it'd be nice to hit a homerun with each one: professor, teacher, boss, friend, lover, priest, rabbi, whatever. But that just doesn't happen. Maybe ten percent are great? That's a whole other discussion. Not going there now.
Regardless - Berkeley Newman Hall, thank you for bringing space and being so interestingly together.
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