Wheeler Hall

California, United States

Exterior only

Visible from the street; the inside is private.

Find out more

Wheeler Hall stands on the University of California, Berkeley campus as a Neoclassical building opened in 1917, named for Benjamin Ide Wheeler, the university's philologist president. Home to the English department and College Writing Programs, the building houses Wheeler Auditorium, the largest lecture hall on campus. The structure gained historical prominence when physicist Ernest O. Lawrence accepted the Nobel Prize in Physics there in February 1940, presented by the Swedish Consul General to avoid Atlantic travel during World War II. Since its opening, Wheeler Hall has served as a focal point for campus activism, hosting significant Free Speech Movement protests during the 1960s and remaining a site of student demonstrations and building occupations into the twenty-first century. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it remains central to Berkeley's architectural and institutional identity.

Movement

Neoclassical architecture

Type: university building
Heritage: National Register of Historic Places listed place
Place: California, United States

This building on

Architecturally similar

Location

37.87103, -122.25906