School Year Kicks Off with New Construction on Berkeley Campus

As the 2023-24 school year gets underway, UC Berkeley’s landscape is being transformed this fall by numerous large construction projects that will create much-needed student housing, a renovated and expanded student engineering center and a home for the campus’s first new college in 50 years.

A recent Berkeley news release shared updates on significant projects. From the northern edge of campus, on Hearst Avenue at Arch Street, the Gateway project is entering its second academic year of construction. This will be the 367,270-square-foot home for the new College of Computing, Data Science, and Society. Nearby, the Bechtel Engineering Center is being renovated to create the four-story Engineering Center.

Anchor House, the first campus housing project to prioritize transfer students, is entering its last year of construction one block from the campus’s western edge and three blocks from BART. Aiding the student housing crisis, the 14-story building will provide apartment living for 772 students. The time-lapse video below shows the current progress.

And a few miles away in Albany, the Albany Village Graduate Student Apartments also are one year from completion. In addition to these four major projects, several more will launch at Berkeley during the upcoming school year. Each will play a vital role in fostering the continual improvement and renewal of the campus and in achieving the ambitious goals in Berkeley’s Strategic Plan. The university’s communications office encourages alumni and those interested to “stay informed about ongoing and upcoming construction,” and visit the Capital Strategies website.