Jennifer Wolch
Dean and William W. Wurster Professor of City and Regional Planning

Welcome to the College of Environmental Design (CED), UC Berkeley’s home for built environment design theory and research, innovation, and practice.

This coming year marks the 50th anniversary of the college — and my inaugural year as its dean. As such, it is a year of celebration and reflection on our remarkable half-century legacy, and also a time for charting the future.

CED stands among the nation’s top five environmental design schools. It is one of the world’s most distinguished laboratories for experimentation, research, and intellectual synergy. The first school to combine the disciplines of architecture, planning, and landscape architecture into a single college, CED led the way toward an integrated approach to analyzing, understanding, and designing our built environment. CED was also among the first to conceptualize environmental design as inseparable from its social, political-economic, and cultural contexts. Its faculty and students have always seen environmental design as an exploratory spatial practice, aimed at creating forms of building, landscape, and urban plans that have yet to be imagined. At the same time, CED has historically emphasized environmental design as a profoundly ethical practice, co-produced through dynamic engagements with diverse communities, workers, businesses, and policy-makers.

Today’s students have inherited unprecedented global challenges that could not have been foreseen when the college was founded in 1959. This legacy will require radically new ways to fashion the buildings and neighborhoods, cities and regions, and landscapes that harbor our diverse ways of life. The mission of the college is to produce creative and skilled professionals to help craft places, cities, and regions — ecologically sustainable and resilient, prosperous and fair, healthy and beautiful — whose logic, form, and materials we as teachers cannot yet conjure. We guide students toward a critical understanding of cities around the world, their architectures and landscapes, and their many layers of meaning. We train students in the art of designing well-loved places that both nurture our senses and challenge our imaginations. And we help students not only to acquire technical expertise, but also to develop transcendent ways of seeing and refiguring the built environment.

It all comes together in Wurster Hall, the 24-7 mothership of the college. Wurster is an intellectual hot-bed, offering an exceptional array of activities and resources:

• Experts and innovators visiting from around the world;
• Symposia and conferences, juries, and exhibits of cutting-edge work;
• Opportunities and programs for international study and practice;
• A superb environmental design library;
• Blake Garden, a large teaching garden in the Berkeley Hills;
• The Environmental Design Archives, one of the nation’s leading archives of architectural and landscape plans and drawings;
• The Visual Resources Center, an extensive slide, photograph, and digital image collection;
• Computer-aided design and manufacturing technology in CED’s advanced fabrication laboratory, as well as traditional wood and metal shop facilities;
• Two major research units, the Center for Environmental Design Research and the Institute for Urban and Regional Development, where students can join faculty research teams from CED and beyond; and
• Scholarly journals including The Berkeley Planning Journal, Places, and Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review.
   

A common thread linking CED’s programs is the studio experience, involving deep immersion in theory, technology, and real-time practice for diverse domestic and international clients. In studio, fledgling designers take flight, becoming visual thinkers, critical observers, and systems scientists, often working with faculty and classmates from across the college’s three departments — Architecture, City and Regional Planning, and Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning. This intense, interactive learning arena is the hallmark of a CED education, offering an unparalleled learning environment located at one of the nation’s top public research universities.

I invite you to join Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design. At CED, you can help forge new urban visions for an exciting, sustainable future.