STATION NO.25
Fall 2025 | UC Berkeley CED
Integrated Design with Eleanor Knowles
Integrated Design Studio is the final design studio in the M.Arch sequence. The final deliverable of such studio is an approximate Design Development Set including mechnical, structural, facade, environmental, and detail drawings. Each week, we met with consultants in structural engineering, life safety, mechnical engineering, and facade design to develop our section’s prompt: Located in within the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) zone of the Bay Area and on the edge of the residential community near Joaquin Miller Park, Oakland Fire Station No. 25 is reimagined and rebuilt to a 33,000 square foot mass timber structure with set program and area requirements to be met.
This project responds the neighborhood defined by rigid privacy of fences and setbacks, treating the site’s rare openness as a catalyst for exploring the tension between reserved and collective space. The design navigates the challenge of introducing a civic-scale fire station into a domestic context by operating between the spatial languages of "prospect and refuge."
By deconstructing the program into four smaller, CLT-paneled volumes that mirror the scale of neighboring houses, the massing creates a familiar sense of intimate enclosure. These solid, shingled forms anchor a central, translucent volume—a light, unbounded field constructed of an exposed glulam frames. This central core, visible through an etched glass facade, houses the apparatus bays and community event spaces, utilizing long spans to achieve maximum structural openness. Through this deliberate contrast between textured solids and translucent voids, the fire station emerges as a permeable, large-scale anchor that balances neighborhood intimacy with civic transparency.