David Brower Center

David Brower Center

The David Brower Center is a nonprofit space located in downtown Berkeley, California, containing three floors of office space, a gallery focusing primarily on environmental and social art, conference facilities, a 178-seat theater, and a restaurant, Gather. It was named to honor David Brower, a Berkeley native who was the first executive director of the Sierra Club and founder of the League of Conservation Voters. The Center is part of a larger mixed use development that includes the Oxford Plaza (an affordable housing complex with street level commercial space). The David Brower Center's mission is to "inspire and nurture current and future generations of leaders, with the goal of making sustainable thinking and practices mainstream."

The David Brower Center is home to dozens of organizations which occupy the three floors of office space, including Earth Island Institute, Friends of the Earth (both of which were founded by David Brower), as well as Equity Community Builders, Impact Hub, Strategen, and several others.

In addition to housing nonprofit organizations, since 2009, the Hazel Wolf Gallery within the Brower Center has highlighted the work of many artists, including Sebastião Salgado, Daniel McCormick, David Liittschwager, Laura Cunningham, Isabella Kirkland, Chris Jordan, David Maisel, Jeffrey Long, Bill Curtsinger, Joseph Holmes, and more recently, Richard Misrach and Douglas Gayeton.

The Brower Center, which was designed by firm WRT/Solomon E.T.C. (now Mithun), completed construction and opened its doors in 2009. The Center makes use of a number of sustainable technologies and design techniques that came out of a highly integrated design process including radiant heating and cooling, daylighting, shading, underfloor air distribution (UFAD), natural ventilation through operable windows, solar panels, rainwater harvesting, and a building dashboard. In 2010, the Center received a LEED Platinum rating from the US Green Building Council. An occupant survey conducted by the Center for the Built Environment in the spring of 2010 indicated that the general satisfaction of the building is 1.78 out of a scale of -3 (very dissatisfied) to +3 (very satisfied). In a post occupancy evaluation conducted by an architecture class at the University of California, Berkeley, over half of the questionnaire respondents said that the building was inspiring in regard to sustainability.

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