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Document ActionsEngineering buildings give up their secretsCheck out these fun facts on your northside structuresDAPPER DIGS: BioE lecturer Terry Johnson in Stanley Hall’s
new BioE teaching lab. Photo credit: Rachel Shafer Photo On the east side of Hearst Memorial Mining Building (Materials Science and Engineering), across the access road, is an old adit, a horizontal mine shaft that the College once used for teaching students how to mine. It goes a quarter of a mile into the Berkeley hills, right under Stern Hall and across the Hayward fault. In its heyday, the adit had a small rail system of carts and tracks to haul and dump ore. Fraternities also used the tunnel to haze pledges. It was closed by the 1980s, and today, only seismologists use it to study the fault. Stanley Hall (Bioengineering) is brand new and features mainly research facilities, including the Biomolecular Nano-technology Center, codirected by BioE professor Luke Lee. Later this academic year, a café will open on the ground floor. The CITRIS headquarters building (multidisciplinary), still under construction, was recently recognized for decreasing its use of portland cement, which requires enormous amounts of energy to produce. Up with the building, down with CO2 emissions! Davis Hall (Civil and Environmental Engineering) used to have a “bone room” where human bones were kept for a CE professor’s research on bones and prosthetic devices. The gymnasium-sized basement of Etcheverry Hall (Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering) once housed a complete nuclear reactor. It was removed when the City of Berkeley declared itself nuclear-free, and its absence permitted the building of Soda Hall. Keep an eye out for the nuclear-powered robotic ant that supposedly lives there according to “Nukees,” a comic strip written by an NE grad and published in the Daily Cal since 1997. Otherwise known as CS Residence Hall, Soda Hall (Computer Sciences) comes complete with showers, kitchenettes and a volleyball court. Your home away from home! In 1982, assistant professor of mathematics Ted Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber, planted a bomb in the Cory Hall (Electrical Engineering) faculty lounge, injuring a professor. In 1985, a second bomb went off in the student computer lab, injuring a student. Bechtel Engineering Center (Interdisciplinary Studies) was once known as “Bechtel Sleeping Center.” Says staff member Pat Berumen, “We used to have long blue couches without arms that were really comfortable, and students slept there all the time. We even had one guy complain about noise. The women’s bathroom door squeaked, and he told us to fix it because it was disturbing his sleep!”Website: Learn more about CITRIS at www.citris-uc.org. |
