Hearst Memorial Mining Building

The roof of the building is tiled, brackets made of timber, and ornamentation is of the classical tradition.[6] The roof tiles are reminiscent of Spanish roofing tiles used in late (post-1790) California mission architecture. As the building's centerpiece, the center vestibule was made notable from the exterior by being made the highest point of the building's facade.[5] Howard unified the exterior facade not by the classical elements of symmetry and hierarchy, but rather filled in voids with ornamental details. Six granite corbel sculptures created by Robert Ingersoll Aitken support the wooden roof brackets. According to Howard, the two male sculptures on the west signified "primal elements", and the two on the east "eternal forces", representative of the character of mining. The two central female sculptures provided a balancing presence, representing "the ideal art, the final flower of life--fresh, mysterious, pure--emerging from the void of chaos".[6]

Hearst Mining building interior in 2010

The central entrance vestibule was dedicated to Senator Hearst, and was also to serve as a space for the mining museum. It was designed to recall Henri Labrouste's Reading Room in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (1858–68).[5] The golden oak doors that open into it from the building's exterior were intended to create a dramatic entrance into an equally dramatic, high-ceilinged space where domes 50 feet in the air are covered in buff-toned Guastavino tiles. The columns that support the internal structure are composed of steel beams, and continue through two floors of balconies lined with blue-green cast-iron railings housed upon steel lattice trusses. Construction details such as its bricks are intentionally exposed to communicate a brusk aesthetic. The Guastavino tiles were a proprietary feature to the domed structural system. They were designed by the Valencian architect Rafael Guastavino, who had immigrated to the United States in 1881, earning notability for his work in the Boston Public Library vaults in the 1890s. Howard and the Guastavino Company kept a professional correspondence prior to the construction of the mining building, and Howard hired Guastavino's workers to install the tilework.[6]

A plaque dedicated to George Hearst was placed on the north wall of the entryway, reading:

This building stands as memorial to George Hearst, a plain honest man and good miner. The stature and mould of his life bespoke the pioneers who gave their strength to riskful search in the hard places of the earth. He had warm heart toward his fellow men and his hand was ready to kindly deed. Taking his wealth from the hills he filched from no man's store and lessened no man's opportunity.

The rooms to the south and west of the vestibule were originally administrative offices, including the Office of the Dean. Lecture halls and the museum curator's office were on the south and east sides, respectively. In the central court to the north of the vestibule was the mining laboratory, and on the east and west ends of the laboratory were the metallurgic and research labs, a library, offices and lecture space.[5] The 3-story-tall tower at the north end of the building was used for the crushing of dry ore. Adjacent east of the tower was the copper and lead smelting laboratory, and adjacent west a gold and silver mill.[6]

John Galen Howard, 1886

Howard gave the building a brusque, industrial aesthetic as a complement to the softer aesthetic of the other buildings in the Hearst Plan. Howard referred to the Mining Building as "the kind, bluff brother amid a bevy of lovely sisters".[5] These architectural features were also intended to communicate the function of the building. In an interview with the University of California Magazine in 1902, 5 years before the building's dedication ceremony, Howard reflects:

The aim has been to give expression to the character of a College of Mining Engineering as distinguished from one of Art, Letters, or of Natural Science. The expression of belles-lettres in architecture demands a more purely classic character than that of scientific studies. Such a building as a library, for instance, may without inconsistency rejoice in all the sumptuous glories of Roman architecture or the Renaissance; the tradition of the world leads on naturally enough in this direction. But ... such delicate and highly organized motives find little place in a Mining Building, which demands a treatment, while no less beautiful, much more primitive, less elaborately developed in the matter of detail, less influenced by the extreme classic tradition either as a canon of proportion or as an architectonic schema. The profession of mining has to do with the very body and bone of the earth; its process is a ruthless assault upon the bowels of the world, a contest with the crudest and most rudimentary forces. There is about it something essentially elementary, something primordial; and its expression in architecture must, to be true, have something of the rude, the Cyclopean. The emotion roused must be a sense of power, rather than that of grace ... To produce a design for a Mining Building which shall in all sincerity express its purpose and at the same time harmonize with future buildings quite as sincere in the expression of their purposes--purposes in almost every case of greater amenity--this has been the aim of the architect in approaching his task in its artistic phase.[6]