A week into the New Year, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) announced that the University of California at Berkeley would receive the Institute Honor Award for Architecture for 2015.
The project for which the university was recognized was the renovated California Memorial Stadium and Simpson Center for Student-Athlete High Performance. The award was in recognition of the architects’ work in preserving the historic character of the iconic stadium while retrofitting it to bring it up to date, as well as integrating it with the state-of-the-art high-performance center.
The California Memorial Stadium dates back to 1923 and was designed by John Galen Howard, a world-renowned architect, to emulate the Roman Coliseum. In 2010, renovations to bring the stadium up to modern standards begun and continued for 21 months. In 2008, construction of The Simpson Center for Student-Athlete High Performance began and it became fully operational in 2012.
When the university puts together information for its catalog printing service, details about the Memorial Stadium, the Simpson Center, and the AIA Honor Award will each, in all likelihood, be included.
California Memorial Stadium was rededicated to Californians who died in service to their country, and the original dedication when the stadium opened in the 1920s was to Californians who died in the First World War. The Simpson Center for Student-Athlete High Performance was named for the late Barclay Simpson ’66, who was the lead donor to the center’s construction fund.
