Appraisal
The Campanile is a site of significance because it engages with the community and with the world on so many levels: from its sheer physicality up to the symbolic nature of its image as the face of UC Berkeley. This symbolism helps to create a brand, an identity of what UC Berkeley means to the world: academic excellence, rigor, and the quest for the truth and understanding of fundamental world problems. The tower is meaningful because it provides an auditory experience throughout one’s day in Berkeley, the bells can be heard throughout the East Bay, and on special occasions creative lighting systems are projected onto its face. Our interpretive plan is a means of bringing all of these significant markers of the tower’s importance to the user, the student, the community member, and so forth, so that they can see it, but also so that their voice can be heard. This approach of multivocality emphasizes community participation. Community participation includes attendance at important Campanile events like the Campanile 100 where its 100 year birthday was celebrated, or in feedback about the mobile apps we plan to design around Campanile heritage. Our interpretive plan includes the maintenance of the site as a physical structure, the continued tradition of hosting events related to important time marks such as centennials, and raising awareness about the tower’s history and present-day importance through our mobile apps, this website, and our interpretive plan document posted to this website. These are all ways that the community can engage with the Campanile, to learn more and explore, and to see what aspects resonate most with them. The tower is after all, property of the campus, but it is also for the larger community and the world. And it is a representative statute to the pursuit of higher learning. As such, it is an icon that anyone in the world can interact with and identify with. With this website and our mobile technologies too, indeed anyone in the world can interact with Sather Tower.
Posted on November 24, 2015, in Anthro136kF2015, Sather-Tower. Bookmark the permalink. Leave a comment.
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