UC Berkeley Undergraduate Academic Building

UC Berkeley has a classroom shortage and a seismic problem, and the Undergraduate Academic Building was designed to solve both at once. The five-storey, roughly 78,000-square-foot building on Campanile Way topped out in August 2024 and completes in 2026, at a total project cost of $136.8 million.

Project Scope

The building adds 27 general-assignment classrooms and a 400-seat auditorium, plus consolidated College of Letters and Science advising space and a rooftop terrace. Assignable area is around 45,000 square feet. It is a mass-timber structure with exposed wood, one of the largest mass-timber academic buildings in the University of California system.

LMN Architects of Seattle designed it, with Forell/Elsesser Engineers as structural engineer and Plant Construction Company of San Francisco building it. Plant’s own project record describes it as an academic seismic replacement building, which is the other half of the brief: it replaces classroom stock that no longer meets UC seismic performance requirements.

Why It Matters

A pure teaching building with no research labs is unusual at a research university of this size, and it says something about where the pressure actually is. Berkeley can fund labs. What it cannot easily do is find rooms for undergraduates, and 27 general-assignment classrooms is a large one-time addition to a constrained campus inventory.

The site is the harder constraint. Campanile Way is the most protected view corridor on campus, which drove the massing, the arcade at ground level, and a facade that references the limestone plaster of the surrounding historic buildings. Combining that with a mass-timber structure and UC seismic performance criteria is a real engineering problem, and it is why Forell/Elsesser, a firm built on seismic retrofit work, sits on the team. Contractors watching mass timber move from demonstration projects into mainstream institutional work should note the scale here.

Project Team & Details