Year Completed: 1898
The Bancroft Dance Studio is the second-oldest building on campus, although it didn’t actually become a part of campus until 1960, and was designed for an altogether different context and purpose. It was built as the First Unitarian Church of Berkeley, among a cluster of other churches (now gone), facing a block of Dana Street that has been absorbed into Spieker Plaza.
It actually represents the second design of the church. The original design was a large complex with a 100 foot tower, designed to look like something from 12th Century Lombardy, by an architect whose eyes were bigger than his budget. The congregation decided to go in a different direction, humbler, and much smaller (roughly 40’ x 40’) and here we are.
The land the church sits on was acquired by UC Berkeley in 1960 through eminent domain (you’d better believe there was a lawsuit), and the outbuildings (including a Maybeck) were town down to make way for Zellerbach Hall.
Architect: A. C. Schweinfurth (1863 - 1900)
In the mid-1800’s, in New York state, a woodcarver specializing in architectural ornaments fathered three sons. All went on to become architects. One went to Boston, another Cleveland, and the third, A. C. Schweinfurth, eventually made his way to San Francisco.
Our boy spent a good deal of his career working for A. Page Brown (along with Bernard Maybeck, one year his senior), where he rose to the role of chief designer, working on the Ferry Building, among others. When he struck out on his own, he secured the patronage of our favorite olde tyme client, William Randolph Hearst (a mantle that would pass to Maybeck and Julia Morgan after Schweinfurth’s untimely death).
While another architect was drafting expensive Italianate towers, Schweinfurth was looking for a project to follow Weltevreden, a widely published house north of campus (now Tellefsen Hall, much altered) that he had designed for Volney and Mary Moody. Moody’s son-in-law was a member of the Unitarian congregation, and got him the commission. Networking.
General Impressions:
I don’t think I looked twice at this building before, despite having spent plenty of time wandering around campus. But I don’t think it’s the building’s fault. Circumstance and the design of the surrounding context have conspired to render it difficult to really notice. While it once faced Dana Street to the west, it now looks out onto Spieker Plaza, which, in this part of campus, is really more of an unremarkable pedestrian thoroughfare than a place to stop and look around. The church was designed for a context that no longer exists, replaced by taller buildings, lesser-used entrances and parking garages.
While it does face two major pedestrian routes, it doesn’t really engage with them, being separated by a retaining wall and bland mulched landscaping. I imagine that it could be a strong marker of the entrance to campus, if the north side of Bancroft Ave were designed differently, trees to make the uphill climb pleasant, more articulation around the sidewalk, an anchor on the west side of the plaza, maybe?
When you approach the building, you face a rather unusual entry sequence. The axial ascent of stairs to the building seems pretty standard for a church, but then the path splits and you have to turn left to the main entrance, or right to access the chapel directly (although all of my assumptions about the chapel are just that. I haven’t been inside). For the main entry route you have to turn again, go up a few steps, go through the main doors, and then (I think) turn one more time to go through the chapel doors. I imagine all of the changes in direction and level were designed to help a person feel that they were taking a journey farther and farther from the mundane world, into one of worship.
It really is a lovely building, once you stop to look at it. It is the most horizontal church I can remember seeing, rendering it welcoming rather than imposing. Add to that the prominence of the gable roof that reaches down to create a very human-scale entrance, and the use of a more residential-style cladding material and you really get a house of worship.
It is a product of its place and time, with important California trees at each entrance (redwood at one, bay laurel at the other), the use of redwood tree trunks as columns (a gift from one of the congregants), and its strong Arts and Crafts attitude.
From the front, it seems very aggressively symmetrical, but from any other angle, it is very… not. I don’t think I’ve ever seen ornamental shingles quite like the ones framing the rose window, and the curved fake buttresses on the south facade, while not structurally necessary, are delightful. I also feel like there are hints of nascent modernism in the building’s approach to ornament, as well as the use of metal sash windows, but maybe that’s just my hindsight talking.
While I was researching the building, I ran across a few projects from a UC Berkeley design studio that suggested replacing it. While I don’t really know how well it works as a performance space (so maybe a new space isn’t a terrible idea), I feel like the more interesting design question is “How would you change the surrounding context to allow this building to reach its potential as a strong contributor to campus identity?”
