John Galen Howard and the University of California: The Design of a Great Public University Campus

Architectural historian Sally B. Woodbridge illuminates the career of John Galen Howard, the University of California's first supervising architect from 1901 to 1924. Howard, a New Englander who had attended MIT and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, worked in the offices of H. H. Richardson and McKim, Mead & White and spent a year in Los Angeles before entering the 1898-99 international competition for an architectural plan for the University of California campus. The competition was sponsored by Phoebe A. Hearst, whose generous funding of it made the University of California known throughout the United States and Europe as a major public institution of higher education. Woodbridge conveys the energy of the turn-of-the-century leaders of the university who, with John Galen Howard, established the campus architecture and setting as the embodiment of their commitment to create a public university of the highest quality.

In addition to the lively story of the Hearst competition and its unexpected outcome, Woodbridge provides detailed descriptions of the major campus buildings designed by Howard and an account of his twenty-five-year career in architectural education as the founder and head of the University of California's School of Architecture. Including a chronology and an annotated bibliography, her book fills in the social context of Howard's work and the character of the campus community during the first quarter of the twentieth century.