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.
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