Casa Zimbabwe
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Casa Zimbabwe, commonly referred to as CZ, is a student housing cooperative in Berkeley, California housing 124 residents. It is part of the USCA co-op system.
Located at 2422 Ridge Road, the house is a mere block from the center of the northern edge of the University of California, Berkeley campus. The brown stucco fortress overlooks North Gate, and the two accessible roofs provide an excellent view of San Francisco, the East Bay, the Berkeley Hills, and most of campus. It sits on Northside atop Holy Hill, the area in the vicinity of a five-way intersection surrounded on all sides by churches and seminaries. The USCA central office and central kitchen are located within the Casa Zimbabwe building, but they only connect to the main residential area by a few doors.
The residents of Casa Zimbabwe are affectionately referred to as Czars.
[edit] History
While every other USCA house was a pre-existing structure eventually converted into a co-op, CZ is unique in that it was built from scratch with the specific intent of being used as a cooperative living space.
The house is divided into three segments. Residents' rooms are located in the east and west wings (known as the "10s" and the "100s" for the room numbering scheme used), both of which are connected in the middle by two stories of wide open common space. Such a layout seems to encourage social interaction more so than in some other houses.
Further evidence of having been built as a student co-op is the strange architecture. As the legend goes, the architects had originally designed the building to look more normal, like the campus dorms. Since many former dorm-residents move into the co-ops to escape the sterility of dorm life, the architects were asked to re-design the house to look less dorm-like.
The inexplicable asymmetry of the building structure seems to corroborate this story. While the east wing is three stories tall, the west wing is four stories and is offset downward by half a floor. The stairwells look like their corners were chopped off as an afterthought, and none of the halls are perfectly straight.
When CZ opened in 1966, it was known as "Ridge Project" since it shares its lot with Ridge House. In 1987, the house residents successfully petitioned to change the house name to its current one, originally intended as a parody of some alternative exotic-sounding proposals. In the spring of 2001, the residents voted during house council to change the house name to Krakistan (though this has never been recognized by anyone outside of the house).
Casa Zimbabwe closed December 19th 2006 in order to perform major seismic retrofitting work. The house reopened August 23, 2007.
