Eccentric Enclave works in Berkeley
New building turns heads, adds whimsy to tattered corner
Even with everything else going on right now, the crazed excess of the newest building on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue is guaranteed to stop you in your tracks.
There’s the threestory cliff of fake stone that wraps around the corner and is 3 feet thick. The heavy (faux) timber siding that brackets groups of windows within the cliff. The fluted columns on the upper floors. Ginormous hanging lanterns and a sprinkling of shutters seemingly painted in whatever hue was close at hand.
It’s as if Harry Potter and Fred Flintstone decided to build a McMansion. On acid.
Hidden beneath all this — stare long and hard — is a fairly conventional sevenstory structure called the Enclave that holds 55 student apartments and is three blocks from UC Berkeley. But in our urban age where so many new buildings come thinly clad in random lines of colored panels for a “contemporary” look, there’s something to be said for a MoorishTudor fever dream.
I used that phrase on Twitter in February when Enclave still was partly in scaffolds. Now that it is done, the headscratching aspect is even more pronounced. In a good
way.
“Whether you love it or hate it, it provokes a reaction,” said Rigel Robinson, who represents this part of Berkeley on the City Council. Some of his constituents are aghast, he admits, but Robinson is a fan: “I love that it’s so spunky. This is a treasure.”
While I’m not prepared to go nearly that far, give Enclave credit. It has nutty gravitas — an affirmation of eccentricity despite a tangled backstory that includes two developers, three architectural firms and a “theming contractor.”
This corner of Telegraph Avenue and Haste Street originally held a residential hotel that burned down in the 1980s. The owner of nearby Rasputin Records, Ken Sarachan, purchased the fencedoff lot in 1994, but let it sit empty until the city moved in 2011 to foreclose on the site. One year and one lawsuit later, the city dropped the threat and Sarachan unveiled renderings of what architect Kirk Peterson at the time called “La Fortaleza” and later El Jardin.
Sarachan “wanted something that looked like a wizard building,” Peterson, whose forte is carefully detailed residential buildings in a traditional vein, recalled this month. “Nobody had ever asked me to do a wonderful, crazy building.”
Peterson’s touch is felt in the final product, with imposing but (relatively) straightforward stucco walls in a Mediterranean vein that emerge from the lumpy base that he says was inspired by medieval Tuscan towns carved into soft volcanic rock. The two upperfloor wings along Haste are connected by a sixthfloor arch.
But the project languished until 2016, when Sarachan brought in Jarvis Architects to repackage the whimsies in more standardized form. No open stairs snaking up the cliff. No tiny windows, irregularly spaced.
The redo was approved in 2018 and construction began after Sarachan sold the project to a development team led by Todd Whitlock, CEO of West Builders of Richmond. Jarvis’ specialty is upscale homes, so Whitlock hired LCA Architects to do the construction drawings. Roofline minarets were toned down. Gold leaf became sheet metal with a patina spray. The “custom Moroccan tiles” — now storebought.
But for the rocky base, the developers went all out.
A fabricator that has worked for Disney and Universal Studios, COST of Wisconsin, sprayed liquid, quickdrying concrete into cagelike rebar forms. Slowerdrying concrete was slathered on top and workers sculpted the crags and crevices as it dried. The same materials were used to shape the large planes of rustic “timber” burrowed into the “cliff.” Scaffolds came down and
voila! The kind of artificial outcrop usually seen at theme parks and zoos now engulfs a corner half a block from People’s Park, across from the ebulliently muraled Amoeba Music.
“This is industrial strength,” Whitlock said. “The city told us, ‘If you’re going to do this, you have to do it right.’ ” The weird thing is, it works. Yes, Enclave is a bastion of rococo overkill. It’s a collision of architectural concepts. But if we’re going to have willful eccentricity at urban scale, what better place than Telegraph Avenue — a nowtattered strip that in its heyday served as the countercultural crossroads of Berzekeley?
Glen Jarvis takes the changes to his firm’s work in stride. “I’d have detailed it differently but ... it’s different than what everyone else is building, and I like that.”
Peterson, who worked on the original concept, is less diplomatic.
“The whole idea was to make it look authentic,” he said. “Not a fake hill town, but a real hill town.”
Personally, I can’t imagine how this concoction ever would have looked like anything except a spirited indulgence. If anything, the revolving door of designers adds to the offkilter fun. Why not surround the windows in recessed arches with mockMoroccan tiles? Why not pop luridly colored windowboxes into stone walls above burrowedout storefronts?
A prehistoric Spanish hacienda? Sure!
The makebelieve continues for the 120 students now living in the dormlike apartments (there are 254 beds, but the number of residents is being kept low by UC Berkeley, which has a master lease for the residential floors). There are four outdoor common areas, and three are tucked behind the concrete rim.
As for the huge and vaguely hobbitlike lanterns that illuminate the exterior — including a 500pound one that hangs from the sixthfloor arch — they’re the work of artist Rebecca Anders. Figurative tile mosaics by Alexander Kori Girard add accents of color to deep niches within the base.
Ultimately, what I like about Enclave is that it’s so engaging. A sevenstory doubletake.
Too much of what gets built today in our cities is formulaic, just good enough to be approved and get financed. The cause might be good, such as the construction of new housing. The result is forgettable.
Not here. Not even close.