Peder Sather was born in Norway, came to California, and made his fortune in banking. He died in 1886, but his wife Jane K. Sather ensured his name would outlast his lifetime by several orders of magnitude. She gave UC Berkeley the tower, the gate that bears her husband's name, endowed chairs in History and Classics, and funded the original twelve bells. The tower opened to the public in 1916, rising 307 feet to include seven principal floors and an eighth-floor observation deck 200 feet above the base. John Galen Howard, who founded the university's Department of Architecture, designed it in the Beaux-Arts tradition - a style that valued symmetry, grandeur, and the kind of confident civic gesture that a young university on the western edge of the continent was eager to make. An elevator carries visitors to the observation deck, where the views sweep across the campus, the Berkeley Hills, San Francisco Bay, and the Golden Gate.

The original twelve bells were cast in 1915 by John Taylor & Co. of Loughborough, England, but did not arrive until 1917. World War I slowed the shipment, and the U.S. Customs Service in San Francisco added further delay. They rang for the first time on November 3, 1917, to mark Cal's Big Game against Washington. For decades, those twelve bells - a single octave - were all the tower had. They could not even play the national anthem, which requires a range of a twelfth. Discussion about expanding the instrument went nowhere for sixty years. Then, in 1978, the Class of 1928 decided to give their alma mater a fiftieth-anniversary gift. They launched a campaign hoping to raise $45,000 for a few additional bells. Within days, they had over $150,000. The ambition grew accordingly: they commissioned a full 48-bell carillon from the Fonderie Paccard in Annecy, France, incorporating the original twelve. By 1983, further gifts from Jerry and Evelyn Chambers expanded it to 61 bells spanning five fully chromatic octaves.

During fall and spring semesters, the carillon sounds three times each weekday: at 7:50 in the morning, at noon, and at six in the evening, each performance lasting ten minutes. Saturdays bring shorter recitals; Sundays feature a 45-minute concert in the afternoon. The bells toll the hour every day between eight in the morning and ten at night. At noon on the last day of instruction each semester, the carillonist plays "They're Hanging Danny Deever in the Morning" - a tradition that uses only the original 1917 bells. Then the carillon falls silent until finals end. The Chambers endowment funds the entire program: a full-time University Carillonist, one of only five such positions in North America, plus eight artist performers, about thirty students per semester, two practice keyboards housed in the tower itself, and a campanology library. Every five years, the university hosts an international Carillon Festival honoring the Class of 1928.

The observation deck's history carries a darker thread. In 1959, a retired attorney jumped to his death from the platform, and daily patrols were instituted. When a student died the same way in 1961, the university enclosed the deck with glass panes. Those panes came down in 1979 because they muffled the newly expanded carillon. Metal bars replaced them in 1981. In 1982, a student scaled the bars but was talked down from the ledge. The tension between openness and safety, between the music that needs to carry and the height that invites danger, has never been fully resolved. But the tower found unexpected tenants who have no such conflicts. In 2017, a pair of peregrine falcons began nesting at the top of Sather Tower. Webcams and the Cal Falcons social media project turned the birds into campus celebrities - predators perfectly at home on the highest perch in Berkeley, indifferent to the bells that ring beneath them.

Sather Tower is a memorial to a Norwegian banker that looks like a Venetian landmark. It is a concert hall oriented vertically rather than horizontally. Its cool stone floors shelter Ice Age mammals where you might expect musical instruments, the Department of Integrative Biology storing La Brea Tar Pit fossils on the lower levels. Students slackline between pollarded London Plane trees on the promenade below. During Big Game week, the California Marching Band's trumpeters climb to the top and blast Cal spirit songs loud enough to reach Oakland. The Campanile is too many things to be any one thing, which may be why it works as the symbol of a university that has always resisted easy categorization.