d’Arte Board

The LA Times’s great art blog Culture Monster has an excellent post on UC Berkeley’s attempts to build a new museum 4 blocks from my house.

Their angle isn’t actually about the proximity to my apartment. Instead the focus is on the effect of the economy on plans to create new ambitious new architectural marvels across the country:

the episode raises questions — questions now relevant in cities around the county — about what happens when high-profile building projects are wounded but not killed by the poor economy, surviving to stumble forward without the big-name architects that helped them gain attention and ease their trips through the approvals process in the first place.

Basically the economy is creating a series of Bait and Switches across the land. Developers sell projects on the strength of their world reknown designs by world reknown architects, then the economy tanks their ability to raise the money to build these projects, so something half-assed gets put in instead. The article does a good job of asking what the point of this is.

In particular, I love that he points out how the $80 million already raised for the new Berkeley Museum (plan pictured above), while well short of the $200 million needed, is exactly how much it would cost to seismically retrofit the current University Art Museum (pictured below).

The current museum design may not be in textbooks, but is spectacular in its own way. It manages to give its galleries the illusion of enclosure while actually maintaining a singular open space throughout. You can casually study the exhibits, then hang out at the ledge , studying the rest of the museum sprawling below you. While it may not be as pretty as the Guggenheim, I think this experience better captures the intent of Wright’s internal design. It’s only drawback is that it happens to be 3 blocks from the Hayward Fault. (This sounds bad, and is, but its not as bad as the University’s football stadium, which is actually bisected by that same fault. Frankly its an apt symbol of our Schizoid Football team…)

Given the issues of California in general and the UC System specifically, I love his solution to take what they can get and preserve what is already a great building, instead of building a half-assed stop gap, then spending more money later to demolish the current building…

Unfortunately, the odds of this system making a decision that actually makes sense are poor. So one more beautiful California tradition will probably be doomed by institutional incompetence and cronyism.