What we create must be artful, useful, and appropriate, and therein lays the mission of the College of Environmental Design. Our founding dean, William W. Wurster, stated this nearly fifty years ago:

“Our first duty is toward our students, of course, but we have another and very pressing duty. That is our duty to California as a fast-growing and increasingly urban state, and we must serve her well in creating beauty, preventing disorder, and making the best use and preservation of her natural resources. Hills, water, land, and forest must all be carefully conserved as the structures of man compete for the space they occupy.”

Wurster's imperative is even more critical and complicated today. As he anticipated, our population has grown enormously, and we have encroached ever further into those hills, forests, and agricultural land. With this growth has come a strain on resources and an increasing likelihood that we cannot sustain our quality of life without a major rethinking of how, what, and where we build. This is why we must renew our commitment to the initial paradigm of the college.

The impact of the built environment has never been more critical to the future of the planet. Concerns about the impact of energy consumption on the environment, especially global climate change, have finally penetrated public consciousness. It’s become clear that the built environment is both our biggest problem and our biggest opportunity for change.

Creating environments and then maintaining and nurturing them are complex tasks. Buildings, landscapes, and city design are not created in isolation. At their best, they support the full range of human activities and enrich our lives. Yet without careful planning and design, what we build exacts a terrible toll that impacts future generations.

Buildings alone account for as much as 50% of all energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions annually. For example, one cannot build even a single dwelling without acknowledging that while the house itself may be energy efficient and made with sustainable materials, inefficient land-use could increase automobile usage and corresponding pollution.

Within this current myriad of pressures, CED seeks to discover a holistic approach to solutions. We were the first educational institution to recognize that the environment is a whole system, and we accept the challenge to be stewards of our environment. As part of a public, land-grant university, we are compelled to engage the most critical challenges facing society and teach the next generation of architects, landscape architects, planners, and developers to operate with passion and commitment to design, collaboration, and integration.

With an eye to the future, CED is impacting our world by:

• Designing state-of-the-art buildings that consume less energy and produce less waste through the use of cutting-edge materials, creative planning, and natural heating, cooling, ventilation, and lighting strategies.
   
  
• Revitalizing urban areas for the coming century through the design of well-built, transit-oriented, carbon-neutral “eco-communities” that successfully balance human, social, and ecological needs.
   
  
• Exploring digital design technologies that streamline project management — reducing costs and saving time while boosting accuracy and productivity.
   
  
• Working on policy and planning reforms that change the way we build locally and influence trends worldwide.
   

On September 20, 2008, UC Berkeley began a $3 billion campus-wide campaign to build a substantial new endowment to preserve the University's promise for future generations. Over the next five years, the Campaign for Berkeley will ensure that CED meets goals at the heart of our mission:

• Retain our top-caliber faculty and recruit new talent to our ranks. In order to keep pace with our peer design schools, we must increase the number of existing endowed chairs, deepen our support for emerging talent to serve as visiting professors, and provide increased funding for research.
   
  
• Attract and educate the finest and most deserving students by funding 15 new graduate fellowships.
   
  
• Renew our facilities for the benefit of our teaching and world-class research.
   

The Campaign for Berkeley asks for renewed commitment to founding principles of CED — what we teach, how we practice, and what we need to accomplish in order to design a better world.