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An A for BAMPFA
The new Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive is not a neutral building. Two friends, one an architecture historian, the other the son of an architect, have already challenged me to defend it, and it hasn’t yet opened. After a preview visit, I give it an A, with a few caveats that keep it from A+.
Much of the credit for the design must go to its director, Lawrence Rinder, who worked with the design team from the beginning. Clearly he set out to make the new museum everything its predecessor was not. The old Berkeley Art Museum on upper Bancroft Way, completed in 1970 to a design by the Bay Area architect Mario Ciampi, remains an icon of its period of brutalist architecture[i], but its design continually frustrated its directors and curators. Set back from the street mid-block , the windowless concrete walls gave no hint of the treasures within. The Pacific Film Archive was housed in a small theater accessed from a garden path off Durant Avenue. The largest galleries, in great concrete cantilevers fanned out from the central entry, had few walls for hanging pictures and high southwest-facing windows which frustrated efforts at effective light control.
The new Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive largely succeeds in correcting these shortcomings. Its new location is highly visible, across from the west entry to the UC campus and on the east side of downtown Berkeley. Its name is outlined in large metal letters on the building’s south façade and abbreviated to BAMPFA (no slash or hyphen) on publications and other signs. The art museum occupies a complete reconfiguration of what was once the UC Press Building, an Art Deco office building and attached saw-tooth roofed factory which housed the printing plant. The film archive occupies a new structure north of the old printing plant, and this addition forms the most visible, and potentially controversial part of the total design. The film archive theater’s exterior sheathed in curved zinc-coated planks resembles a giant silvery pastry bag which narrows as it flops over the old printing plant, and at its “nozzle” end forms a canopy over the new museum entrance on Center Street. Windows along the sidewalks next to both the old and new structures offer glimpses of the activities inside.
Despite its shortcomings the old art museum on Bancroft might have been retained had it not been determined that its concrete structure did not meet seismic safety codes. The old building was braced with awkward steel brackets under the cantilevered galleries while a search began for a new site. The former UC Press Building in downtown Berkeley, which had been closed, was identified as the site for the new BAMPFA. Preservationists rallied to save the building which was built in 1939 and made history when the founding charter of the United Nations was printed there in 1945, and it was designated a City Landmark in 2004. The University however, went ahead with plans for demolition, and in 2006 selected the Tokyo firm, Toyo Ito & Associates, to design a new building on the site. Rinder joined BAMPFA as director in 2008 when it became obvious that the scope and design of the Ito scheme was well beyond the anticipated fundraising. In 2010 the University announced the old building would be “repurposed” rather than demolished and selected Diller Scofidio + Renfro, architects from New York, as new design architects. They were teamed with the San Francisco firm, EHDD, whose history of adaptive reuse goes back to the Cannery on San Francisco’s north waterfront.
The new architects had designed an art museum, but their fame resulted from their design of the High Line, a linear park on the abandoned elevated tracks of an industrial railway on the lower west side of Manhattan. Their most recent project in California is the Broad Museum in downtown Los Angeles, a box made of curved white shapes that has some superficial resemblances to the Ito design for BAMPFA which had been abandoned in 2009. But the two projects in the firm’s past which may have had the most influence are their redesign of a part of Lincoln Center for Performing Arts in New York City and their aborted design for the Hirshhorn Museum on the Mall in Washington, DC.
At Lincoln Center the architects literally sliced off a corner of the building and installed a wall of glass, opening the view of passersby on Broadway into the lobby of what had been an almost hidden concert hall. At the Hirshhorn, a 1970’s art museum in the shape of a giant stone donut, the architects were asked to make a space for temporary exhibits and social gatherings. Their solution was a kind of giant balloon in the middle of the donut which could be inflated to convert the donut hole into a high dramatic space for special events. Washington, DC is a notoriously difficult place to propose anything the least avant garde, and the project went nowhere. However, I suspect that the concept of the Hirshhorn balloon has subliminally influenced the BAMPFA “pastry bag”. Good ideas often get recycled.
To repurpose the old printing plant the architects completely disassembled the old saw-tooth roof and excavated a new floor below which houses a series of simple, almost austere galleries, with white sheetrock walls and, with one exception, polished gray concrete floors. The one exception is a gallery with a warm red-orange floor made of end-cut Douglas fir blocks, which harkens back to the industrial floors of the old printing plant but without the patina of machine oil and silvery glints of linotype shards. Gallery lighting is entirely artificial and controllable. In the upstairs gallery natural light can enter through the rebuilt saw-tooth roof. This gallery is similarly finished with white sheetrock and polished concrete floors. Most of the gallery walls on both levels can be rearranged with minimal reconstruction for different kinds of exhibits.
The two levels are connected by a two-story performance space which opens directly from the museum entry. Here Paul Discoe, a local craftsman, has built a stunning set of bleachers from boards milled from the Canary Island pines which were cut down to create the site of the PFA theater. On the wall north of the bleachers and easily visible to passersby on Center Street is a huge and whimsical mural created by the Chinese artist Qiu Zhijie, inspired by Chinese literary gardens. These murals will be replaced every six months.
PFA screenings will take place in the 233-seat Barbara Osher Theater, which from the outside forms the dramatic “pastry bag,” and a 28-seat theater located near the front of the museum. The walls and seating of both theaters are entirely black. Seating is generously spaced and steeply raked to assure spectators a good view.
The project’s design architect Charles Renfro said that the building was intended provide “wandering flow,” “surprises,” and a way for the visitor to “get lost in space and thought,” but in fact the building is distinguished by clearly defined paths. A visitor enters from Center Street into a long corridor which rises above the second floor, where the Café Babette is located, and leads directly to the Osher Theater. The ceiling of the corridor and the café above are painted a bright red-orange which the architect says is intended to be “fleshy” as befits an interior, building or animal. Whatever its intent, the brilliant color, so in contrast to the white galleries and the black theaters, aids in keeping a visitor oriented. The galleries in the level below are also linked by a ramped corridor, which opens to give glimpses (“surprises”?) to galleries which are not directly connected. Lower level space under the theater houses the film archives and study center. Horizontal windows by the sidewalks above form skylights for these spaces and create a sense that the bottom of the theater (the “pastry bag”) is floating. In fact careful observation shows that there are sturdy steel columns for necessary seismic bracing that echo the steel framing of the old printing plant now carefully restored above the upper gallery.
Some Caveats
The new BAMPFA succeeds in being open and welcoming. What I call the “pastry bag” clearly links the film archive architecturally to the art museum and gives it equal billing. Despite the “wander(ing)lust “ of its designers, the building has a clarity of organization and way-finding that museums often lack. Viewed from across the street the silvery “pastry bag” makes the old Art Deco offices, newly painted bright white, stand out as they never did before. What’s not to like?
Well, the café for one thing. Not the food which, if as good as the samples offered at the press opening, will be excellent, but the location. Maybe in some future renovation the museum will put the book store, now facing the sunny side of Center Street, upstairs and move the café down so that it can offer seating on the sidewalk, like the very successful café at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. At the moment the museum has chosen to put the café in a tube-like space on the second floor, which terminates in an awkward triangle cantilevered over the entry. The only connection to the activity of the Center Street sidewalks is through a window, which also provides a dramatic view to the west and the bay, a view soon to be lost as high-rises approved or soon-to-be approved close the skyline along Shattuck.
The saw-tooth windows. The great north-facing windows of the saw-tooth roof are mostly covered in semi-transparent fabric. Perhaps this is inevitable for preservation of the art on display, but it is a loss for the architecture and for anyone who remembers the grandeur of the space when it was occupied by clacking machinery and busy printers.
The LED screen. On the exterior of the theater, at the bottom of what I call the “pastry bag,” is a huge LED screen which can be used to project movies toward a small grassy plot at the corner of Oxford and Addison. For the architects this is another “window” to open the museum to the public. To me it looks more like a billboard that will dangerously distract drivers on busy Oxford Street. I also wonder if in an era of constantly changing technologies, especially in electronic media, it makes sense to devote an entire exterior wall to something which may soon be obsolete.
Parking is my last caveat. The University demolished a three-level structure to build the BAMPFA. A few blocks south they have closed a large surface lot to build an intercollegiate swimming stadium. The parking demand did not go away, and it’s doubtful those who parked in the lost spaces will go to the new and hideously ugly parking structure on Gayley Road, a steep half mile away. The city keeps approving new downtown luxury housing projects with little or no parking, under the fantasy that every tenant will use BART and no one will own a car. Maybe the exterior LED screen can project a virtual reality parking garage.
Opening Celebrations
The hoopla surrounding the opening of the new Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive approaches a level more typical of a class reunion or a major football game. A temporary pavilion as wide as the new museum will house the opening gala. The University has twice bought full-page ads in the New York Review of Books, to publicize the building and the opening show. Kicking off opening events, Charles Renfro, one of the building’s architects spoke to a large crowd about the design on Wednesday. The press was welcomed Thursday morning, and events large and small will follow through the weekend for donors, students, museum members, and on Sunday, a free opening for the general public. The inaugural exhibition titled Architecture of Life features over 250 objects, from a newly acquired painting by Gustave Caillebotte (on view in March) to webs woven by real spiders (artists not on view) and wooden bowls by the late, great Berkeley woodworker, Bob Stocksdale. The BAMPFA website is bampfa.org.
Christopher Adams is a retired Berkeley architect.
