Bay Area // East Bay UC Berkeley’s five-story, 24-hour Moffitt Library is back — and transformed

By Sam Whiting, Staff Writer, Aug 25, 2026

Classes didn’t start until Wednesday at UC Berkeley, but students crowded outside Moffitt Undergraduate Library on Monday in anticipation of its 1 p.m. opening. It had been closed for most of two years for a $58 million renovation, so the underclassmen were eager to see what they had been missing.

“We’ve never seen it, but all the older kids talk about it, and we’re big library fans,” explained Alexa Koniares, 19, a sophomore from Thousand Oaks (Ventura County), who had come with her roommates Lorelei Everhart and Gianna Bordi from their house off-campus. 

The reopening completed Moffitt ’s renovation, following an overhaul of the top two floors in 2016. The library now offers five floors of nooks and crannies spread across 125,000 square feet — and no books.

Those were moved in 2016 to the adjacent underground Main Gardner Stacks. Instead, the university has designed Moffitt as a destination for study, collaboration and creativity. It has quiet floors and noise floors, and you can eat and drink coffee anywhere. It also has airport lounge seating and cocoons for sleeping. 

“We’ve heard about the sleeping pods,” Koniares said.

Those are a crucial element because Moffitt is the only campus library open 24 hours a day during the week. When the underground stacks close at 2 a.m., it gives students a safe on-campus place to pull the requisite all-nighters or to sleep until other buildings reopen at 8 a.m. 

All of this has been badly missed since the library closed after the fall 2024 semester.

“It was open. Then it closed,” said Lorenzo Arevalo, a senior from Torrance (Los Angeles County). “Sophomore and junior years, it was gone.” 

Waiting in the crowd of students for the doors to reopen Monday, Arevalo was on a mission: He’d brought his own food. “I want to be the first student to eat in the snack room,” he explained as he pressed toward the front.

Just before 1 p.m., a librarian unlocked the door and yelled, “Have your ID ready!” Then the main doors opened to welcome them to the Carol T. Christ Center for Connected Learning at Moffitt Library. Renamed for the retired chancellor, the five-story building is set into the hillside with the entrance on the third floor. 

Staff were on duty to hand out maps, which outlined noise levels expected on all five floors, themed organically from bottom to top, starting with aquatic and rising to mineral to flower to birds to trees. 

But hardly anybody stopped for the maps. Instead, they went straight to the free cookies and coffee provided by the Free Speech Movement Cafe, then headed down the stairs, where the intensive studying has historically been done.

The second floor, which had been closed off as a staff floor for 30 years or more, is now rimmed in four-person nooks that look as comfy as booths in an old-time diner. Within 10 minutes, sophomore Zain Dahdul, 19, of Long Beach had already laid claim to nook Gold A with two brothers from the Phi Psi fraternity, Franklin Kuo of San Mateo and Ben Komlos of Santa Monica.

“We’re just prepping for the school year,” said Dahdul. “We already love it. We might sleep here some nights.” That will be done in the Wellness Room on the fifth floor, where students were already trying out the rest pods on Monday.

“I could sleep here, 100%,” said Navika Singhal, a senior, who has had to study at home off campus the last two years. “At home, I get distracted. I’ll be more focused here,” she predicted.   

The reopening of Moffitt coincided with the grand opening of UC Berkeley’s new Undergraduate Academic Building. A new $557 million computer and data science building also opens on campus this week.

Continue/Read Original Article: UC Berkeley’s 24-hour Moffitt Library is back after $58M overhaul