In 1898 and 1899 an ambitious international competition was held to determine a master plan for the buildings and setting of the University of California, Berkeley. This competition was the idea of a recently hired instructor of mechanical drawing, the architect Bernard Maybeck. The generous patron who made the whole campaign possible was the mining and real estate heiress Phoebe Apperson Hearst, who would become the university?s greatest early benefactor. Over a hundred entries were received for the preliminary round of judging, in Antwerp, Belgium. Almost all of the designs reflected the academic teachings of Paris's Ecole des Beaux-Arts, including the plan and spectacular renderings by Emile Bénard that were awarded first prize in final deliberations in San Francisco in the late summer of 1899. His entry, submitted under the motto "Roma," pictured a complex of Franco-Roman-style buildings along major axes and on grand open squares. By 1901, however, John Galen Howard took over as the supervising architect, altering Bénard's scheme which in the process became quite his own. Howard served as campus architect until 1924.
