UC Berkeley is planning a new building to house their art museum and film archive. The Chron has all the information on the new project, which is designed by renowned architect Toyo Ito.
According to the article, Ito set out to create a space that enables fluidity of movement, thus allowing the building to provide for changing art exhibitions and needs of the students. We like the comparison the author makes of the flowing walls to "ribbons or drapes", and by looking at the pictures, it seems to be an apt description. The building isn't set to open until 2013, but we're already excited to see the final project.
Read more about the building here.
Images: Toyo Ito & Associates
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Comments (6)
anyone else find giggles setting in after reading "berkeley" and "chron" in the same sentence...?
fantastic! can't wait to se it realized.
if only Don Fisher had hired Ito to design HIS museum for the presidio!
i think it would be a small miracle if that thing is open by 2013...Cal has had some hard times with construction lately. but it is a great design...i just hope they have a good use in mind for the existing museum building (worth a visit)! i love the street-level interest and accessibility. that part of downtown needs it!
exciting!
and about time!
You know, I can't quite figure out why, but this really reminds me of the City Hall plaza in Boston. Maybe it's the big expanses of hard, light-colored substances. And I think this, like the plaza, is one of those designs that looks gorgeous on paper but doesn't work in real life. Look closely at how big the people in the drawing look compared to the size of the building and the concrete around it. In real life, standing next to this building would make any normal human feel lost and dwarfed by hard, cold, white concrete and stone (or whatever the building is made of); it would feel like a vast wasteland, like the Boston plaza, and people would rush to get away from it. On paper, all those swoops and curves show up, but from the ground level, it's all hard and cold and forbidding. I suspect they've drawn such a large number of people into the picture to make it look more welcoming. It all looks very stylish, but, seriously, would you want to sit at those tables with all that white stone around you and towering over you and no shade anywhere near?
Here's a picture of the City Hall and part of the plaza (scroll down); beautiful building but walking through there is creepy and forbidding, a wind-swept no-man's-land.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2007/11/ugly_the_new_be.html