On the northeast side of the UC Berkeley campus is a granite Beaux-Arts building with a grand interior gallery. It was built at the height of California's mining boom.
A memorial to a mining senator
UC Berkeley's fact sheet says the building was completed in August 1907, designed by John Galen Howard and paid for by Phoebe Apperson Hearst in memory of her husband, U.S. Sen. George Hearst. He was a prosperous miner who died in 1891. Initial construction cost $671,000, and the total after furnishing was $1,065,000. Wikipedia says Howard designed it with help from Julia Morgan and Samuel B. Christy, the dean of the College of Mines, and that Hearst paid for Howard and Christy to tour mining schools in the U.S. and Europe first.
The university says it was the world's largest building devoted to mining education. At the time, UC had the largest mining college in the world, and one-fifth of its male undergraduates studied mining. The Berkeleyan says the restored vaulted entrance gallery mirrors Henri Labrouste's 19th-century reading room in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.
Built on the fault zone, saved by rubber
The fact sheet puts the building about 800 feet west of the Hayward Fault. A four-year, $90.6 million renovation and seismic retrofit added 134 steel-and-rubber base isolators, which can move 28 inches in any horizontal direction so the building can ride out earthquakes. The university says the technology was pioneered by UC Berkeley engineers. The building reopened in 2002, with new labs and classrooms. Wikipedia says it now houses the Materials Science and Engineering Department.
The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Nearby is the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, named for the same benefactor.