With the opening of the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, the Bay area feels like it’s experiencing a new wave in the institutionalized arts. And yes, the Other Side — namely, the East bay — is certainly stepping up to the plate.
Toyo Ito, one of Japan’s most inventive contemporary architects, has been selected to design a new home for the Berkeley Art Museum (BAM) and the Pacific Film Archive (PFA). After a 1997 campus survey found the BAM/PFA building to be seismically unstable, the call for a new museum endured years of planning and deliberation. The original 1970 museum, designed by Mario Campi, has been retrofitted in part to remain open while current plans are underway.
According to a University press release, programming for the new BAM/PFA facility will combine research, education and gallery space. The future museum’s location has been set at the corner of Oxford and Center Streets on UC Berkeley’s campus, visually connecting the University’s main western entrance to downtown Berkeley. Ito and the University are also committed to enforce high green design standards that either meet or surpass Silver-level LEED requirements. With an estimated total cost of $80-100 million, this may prove to be an ambitious goal indeed. Preliminary designs will be revealed this summer, and museum director Kevin E. Consey has suggested that the new design will include rooftop gardens on a distorted grid.
I am ecstatic about Ito’s selection. The design for the Sendai Mediatheque (2001, above) is a brilliant example of his futuristic vision of an interactive arts incubator (a radical departure from than traditional museum’s passive viewing environment). Housed in a transparent cube supported by organically latticed service columns resembling trees, the Mediatheque supports the fine arts, film, digital media as well as an expansive library and open audiovisual studios. Other acclaimed projects include the Serpentine Gallery in London (2002) and the Matsumoto Performing Art Center (2004).
Ito always surprises with his hyper media and design sensibility, which differs from the cutting-edge likes of Frank Gehry or Daniel Liebeskind; in place of glitzy materials and forms that don’t follow function, Ito offers a much more subdued form of visual distortion. With Gilles Deleuze and the natural world as cited sources of inspiration, I can’t wait to see what he dreams up for the new BAM/PFA center.
NB: For those of you who haven’t caught the Bruce Nauman exhibition at BAM, A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s, run over soon before it closes on April 15. The exhibition also may remind experimental music fans of Matmos‘ latest album, dedicated to philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
