Berkeley Can’t Live Without — or With — Massive Modernist Tower

Evans Hall, a 10-story tower at the University of California at Berkeley, is so widely reviled that administrators would love to tear it down and start over. But they can’t afford to.

Critics say the 1971 building, designed in a Modernist style by the architect Gardner A. Dailey, blocks views of San Francisco Bay and casts a shadow
— literally — on one of the university’s landmarks, the Hearst Mining Building. But on a campus with many pressing capital needs, a decision on what to do with Evans Hall might not be made 2015, administrators say. Josh Keller, a Berkeley student who is a former Chronicle intern, explains.