The old building of the Museum of Art at the University of California at Berkeley was declared seismically unsafe back in 1999. In 2006, Toyo Ito presented a project for a new complex consisting of curved cylindrical shapes with niche courtyards. However, funding problems forced the university to significantly reduce the scale of new construction and, as a result, abandon the Ito project. The repeated competition, to which 10 architectural firms were invited, ended with the victory of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Their project, worth about $ 100 million and an area of 7,680 m2, is about half of what Ito planned, and, instead of a total reconstruction, involves the renovation and expansion of existing buildings.
The project combines the building of the former university printing house in 1939 on Oxford Street with a new structure. As a result of the conversion, the one-story printing house will retain the original shed lanterns resembling a comb-like outline, steel columns in the interior and a three-story administrative wing. The facades will change only along Center Street, where instead of windows there will be showcases of the museum shop. After the renovation, the old walls, including the basement, will house a museum collection, gallery spaces, a mini-cinema with 32 seats, a training center, and the wing - auditoriums and offices.
The two main levels of the galleries will be isolated from the outer walls, like islands. The total exhibition area will increase by 30%.
A new structure of complex non-linear shape, wrapped in a corrugated metal shell, envelops the old building. From the northeastern side, it "swells" into the volume of an archival cinema with 230 seats, and on Center Street spills out with a whimsical cafe console with a panoramic window overhanging the main entrance to the museum. In addition, the new building houses a library, film study center, public space and rooms for researchers of the museum's collection.
On the north side of the reconstructed building, there is an open area with a huge external cinema screen, which is the back side of the cinema screen. The architects have arranged free access to a fairly extensive part of the museum, where entrance tickets are not required. The space of the main galleries is ajar from Oxford Street through a transparent sloping facade, reminiscent of similar solutions by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in the projects of the Broad Art Foundation Museum in Los Angeles or the Guipar Pavilion in New York's Lincoln Center.
The long-running project, which has been under way since the 1990s, is scheduled to be completed by 2015.
