At UC Berkeley’s new College of Computing, Data Science, and Society, an interlocking building of curved glass and sleek columns, the building has been designed so that the technologies of the future inevitably collide.

The 367,000-square-foot building, named the Barbara and Gerson Bakar Gateway, was designed by the architecture firm Weiss/Manfredi in collaboration with Gensler. It has lecture halls, labs, offices, and common areas for students and professors across a wide range of fields, including computer programming, robotics, and AI.

The college’s inaugural dean, Jennifer Chayes, says the lines between academic fields are becoming so blurry it makes sense to bring all these different courses of study under one roof and literally remove many of the walls that would have otherwise separated them.

“The building is porous in a way that other buildings are not, reflecting the disciplinary porosity of the college, and the fact that we want all of our students to emerge with an ethos of compassion and a deep sense of responsibility to society,” Chayes says.

Chayes, who spent 23 years at Microsoft as a technical fellow and lab director, came to the University of California, Berkeley, in 2020 to build the institution’s first new college in more than 50 years. And she wanted a building that would live up to the college’s mission and potential. Working closely with the architects Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi throughout the design process, she was not shy about pursuing that vision.

“I wrote them poetry and prose about how I hoped the building would make people feel,” Chayes says.

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