Berkeley, California, USA
Hidden beneath all this — stare long and hard — is a fairly conventional seven-story structure called “the Enclave” that holds 55 student apartments.
The recently completed dormitory at the University of California at Berkeley, located at Telegraph Avenue and Haste Street in Berkeley, looks as if it were designed by Fred Flintstone with a remote homage to Antoni Gaudí.
The project, in the style of a “Moorish palace,” was first dreamed up by Ken Sarachan, who owns a number of properties and businesses around Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley’s Southside neighborhood.
After years in Limbo, the property was eventually sold to Todd Whitlock of Point Richmond-based West Builders.
Under his new ownership, the project is called Telegraph Haste Student Housing, now dubbed “Enclave Dormitory.”
The building also went from six to seven stories, but gained only 3 feet, increasing from 72 to 75 feet tall.
Architect David Bogstad, whose firm specializes in working on “complicated buildings and getting them built,” marshaled the project to completion.
The “skin” of the dormitory was designed with a rather unique construction to create the “Moorish palace” effect.
The three-story cliff of fake stone wraps around the corner and is 3-feet thick. The heavy (faux) timber siding that brackets groups of windows within the cliff. The fluted columns on the upper floors.
Ginormous hanging lanterns and a sprinkling of shutters seemingly painted in whatever hue was close at hand.
“Remarkable! Only in California,” states architecture critic Christian Narkiewicz-Laine.
“In our urban age where so many new buildings come thinly clad in random lines of colored panels for a “contemporary” look”.
LCA Architects “the Enclave” Dormitory
Architects: LCA Architects
Developers: West Builders
Photographers: John Sutton Photography
