Memorial Stadium was originally conceived as an important place for students, alumni, faculty and the general public to come together and celebrate athletic competition. The historic stadium is one of the most beloved and iconic structures on the UC Berkeley campus, however decades of deferred maintenance had challenged its functionality and diminished its significance. The key goals for this project were to restore the stadium’s historic and civic prominence, integrate modern training and amenity spaces, and address severe seismic concerns. The program was a delicate historic preservation, the addition of major new construction and a major seismic retrofit.
To achieve this, the structure of the stadium was removed while the historic facade was preserved through an extensive temporary bracing system. The new athlete training facility, the Simpson Center, was set into the landscape and in front of the stadium as a “land form” building, a new grand 2-acre public plaza for the stadium was created on the roof. This freed up space and volume within the stadium, allowing for a new concourse, program and fan amenity spaces within the volume of the old structure.
press box/club structure crowns the historic wall; its truss-like design acts as a counterpoint to the historic façade.
STUDIOS Architecture worked as the Associate Architect in close collaboration with the Executive Architect HNTB.