Toyo Ito 為加州柏克萊大學設計 Berkeley Art Museum

[forgemind.news]

Toyo Ito 伊東豊雄受加州柏克萊大學(UC Berkeley)設計一棟建築物作為柏克萊美術館( Berkeley Art Museum) 及太平洋電影資料館(Pacific Film Archive)使用，如果沒有意外的話，該案會於 2013 年完成啟用。


↗ 設計模擬圖


↗ 設計模擬圖


↗ 設計模擬圖


↗ 設計模擬圖


↗ 設計案位置

以下文章轉貼自SFGate

Box of plenty: design for Berkeley art museum
John King
Tuesday, June 10, 2008

He doesn't have the name recognition of a Frank Gehry or a Daniel Libeskind, but Toyo Ito is one of Japan's most acclaimed and adventurous architects. Looking at the design for a downtown Berkeley museum that would be his first building in the United States, it's easy to see why.

The white steel walls part and fold like ribbons or drapes. Inside, spaces flow one into the next: a gallery here, a screening room there, a terrace scooped into the facade. It's a refined honeycomb, enlarged to human scale.

If reality measures up to Ito's vision, this home for art could be a sinuous work of art itself when it opens in 2013.

"We want the feeling that nature has - merging and melting," Ito said last week by phone, via an interpreter, from his office in Tokyo. "The spaces will shrink and enlarge, shifting as you move through."

The project involves a new home for UC Berkeley's Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, twins now housed on Bancroft Street in a concrete redoubt from 1970, designed by Mario Ciampi.

Ciampi's building is an architectural tour de force, with the interior spaces fanning out like a stack of heavy cards - but the wide-open form and stone-hard structure limits its adaptability to new forms of art, such as video installations.

Ito takes a different approach to the project he's been working on since the fall of 2006, when the university selected him to design a facility that would blend the functions of the two closely affiliated institutions.

The new site is at Center and Oxford streets, filling half a block that faces the grass and trees of the western edge of the UC Berkeley campus. It also sits within a stone's throw of BART and downtown Berkeley's tallest buildings.
Inside the box

The architectural response by Ito bears no resemblance to the sharp-edged bravado of Libeskind's new Contemporary Jewish Museum, or the Thom Mayne-designed San Francisco Federal Building that opened last year. Instead, Ito has conceived a simple three-story box with each level divided into 16 roughly equal squares.

Then the fun begins.

Instead of a formal procession of rooms, corridor leading to gallery, the spaces bleed one into the next. One gallery might have a fairly traditional form; the next beckons like a calm eddy off a stream. The walls might peel back like curtains at one entrance, or lift up as though an unseen hand is offering you a glimpse behind a veil.

The ground floor of the 139,000-square-foot structure will be the most porous of all. From Center Street, patrons could amble through on a loose diagonal, never paying admission, to another doorway at the corner of Oxford and Addison streets.
Blending traditions

The organic swirl is partly a response to the nature of the institutions, which blend traditional artwork with film screenings and experimental installations. But Ito said he also is drawn by the location, which blurs town and gown, green landscape and gray streets.

"We're not on the campus. We're not in the middle of the city, either," said Ito, whose firm is being assisted by San Francisco's EHDD. "The grid erodes, creating a fluid form."

That fluidity is accented by a structural approach never attempted in the United States at this scale.

The walls that snake through the grid will be engineered to bear the weight of the building, so there'll be no need for freestanding columns. But the walls also will be just 5 inches thick.

Because of the cellular layout - picture an easygoing egg-carton - the weight will be distributed so evenly that the walls will consist of little more than a 3-inch-thick layer of concrete compressed between two inch-thick plates of steel.

Unorthodox as this sounds, it's a natural progression for Ito: His buildings in Japan often start with grids and then whittle away as much structure as possible in pursuit of elegant settings that encourage exploration.

"This is not a place where you only see art," Ito said. "It is various experiences, various media, but all related." As for the engineering, "We have done similar structures in Japan ... this one has curves - but creating a curved surface by weaving steel panels has been done many times in shipbuilding."

The schedule calls for demolition of the existing buildings next year, followed by construction in 2010 and an opening in 2013. The anticipated budget - privately funded, university officials hasten to say - is estimated to be roughly $120 million for construction alone.

As for Ciampi's arts center, it will get a seismic retrofit and be put to new use.
School ties

Beyond the architectural details, Ito's building is fascinating for how it might alter the map of central Berkeley.

Like many university cities, Berkeley pretends there's a solid line between town and gown. Downtown, however, the two increasingly overlap. New apartments often are rented to students; older office space is snapped up for campus spillover.

By placing its new museum on Center Street, UC would make the link visible at the same time it enlivens an area it has tended to treat as a glorified service yard. Indeed, the two buildings now on the site are a parking garage and a printing plant (the United Nations charter was printed there in 1945, causing some Berkeleyans to call for its preservation).

Other projects are simmering. The adjacent block of Center Street - a well-trod path from BART to the campus - may become a plaza. Next door to Ito's site, the university has selected a developer to build a conference center topped by a hotel, though that project is moving slowly.

It's a site charged by the sensitive relationship between the university and the surrounding community. Ito's design offers the chance for a symbol that shows town and gown can gain strength from each other - and that the definition of an art museum is as fluid as the definition of art itself.

[eaGer]

轉貼自 NYTimes







A Berkeley Museum Wrapped in Honeycomb
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Published: November 24, 2008

BERKELEY, Calif. — I have no idea whether, in this dismal economic climate, the University of California will find the money to build its new art museum here. But if it fails, it will be a blow to those of us who champion provocative architecture in the United States.

Designed by the Japanese architect Toyo Ito, the three-story structure suggests an intoxicating architectural dance in which the push and pull between solitude and intimacy, stillness and motion, art and viewer never ends. Its contoured galleries, whose honeycomb pattern seems to be straining to contain an untamed world, would make it a magical place to view art.

Beyond its aesthetic appeal, however, Mr. Ito's design underscores just what is at stake as so many building projects hang in the balance. On a local level, the museum could help break down the divide between the ivory tower at the top of the hill and the gritty neighborhood at the bottom. More broadly, it could introduce an American audience to one of the world's greatest and most underrated talents, sending out creative ripples that can only be imagined.

The museum would replace the existing Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, a bunkerlike building completed in 1970 that was badly damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

Standing on a rough commercial strip at the campus's southern edge, the old building is still marred by the big steel columns that were installed after the quake to support its cantilevered floors. Its rough, angular concrete forms and oddly shaped galleries are awkward settings for art.

The new museum would rise several blocks away, at the seam between the main entrance to the university's leafy hillside campus and Berkeley's downtown area. Mr. Ito conceived the design as part of a drawn-out public promenade, and he has packed the bookstore, a cafe, a gallery, a 256-seat theater and a flexible 「black box」 onto the ground floor. The more contemplative galleries, which include spaces for temporary exhibitions and the museum's permanent collections of Western and Asian art, are on the second and third floors.

In the renderings the building's creamy white exterior vaguely resembles a stack of egg cartons that has been sliced off at one end to expose the matrix of contoured chambers inside. The forms peel away at various points to create doorways and open up tantalizing, carefully controlled views into the interiors, as if the building's facade had been slowly eroding over the millenniums.

Teasingly voyeuristic, the effect brings to mind partly demolished buildings and the aura of intimate secrets about to be revealed. But Mr. Ito is not interested in simply obliterating boundaries, as you would with a conventional glass box. His aim is to create a relaxed relationship between private and public life: while acknowledging that contemporary museums are often hives of social activity, he understands that they can also be places where we want to hide from one another and lose ourselves in the art.

The ground floor is conceived as an intense, compressed version of the surrounding street grid. Once inside, visitors will have to pay to enter a formal temporary gallery just to the right of the main entry. Or they can slip around it and follow the procession through the more informal interstitial spaces, which will be used for video art and site-specific installations. The theater and black box space are tucked away in the back.

Mr. Ito once said that he would like to create spaces that are like 「eddies in a current of water.」 The interstitial spaces seem to swell open and close up to regulate the movement of people through the building; the self-contained, honeycomblike spaces, by contrast, produce a sense of suspension rather than enclosure, as if you were hovering momentarily before stepping back into the stream.

As you ascend through the museum, this effect intensifies, and the spaces become more contemplative. The main staircase is enclosed in one of the contoured volumes, giving you psychological distance from the activity below. Once you reach the main gallery floors, the experience becomes more focused: the rhythm through the rooms is broken only occasionally, when a wall peels back to allow glimpses of the city.

Mr. Ito has positioned most of the doorways in the galleries' contoured corners, which allows for a maximum of uninterrupted wall space for the art while emphasizing the rooms' sensual curves. Most of the galleries have a single opening; others are contained in interstitial spaces, part of the general flow through the building. The contrast, which creates unexpected perspectives, has more to do with Tiepolo's heavens than with Mondrian's grids.

As with all of Mr. Ito's work, the building's structural system is not an afterthought but a critical element of the ideas that drive the design. The honeycomb pattern gives the building a remarkable structural firmness, allowing for walls only a few inches thick. Made of steel plates sandwiched around concrete, they will have a smooth, unbroken surface that should underscore the museum's fluid forms. The tautness of the bent steel should also heighten the sense of tension.

Of course, Mr. Ito is still fine-tuning his design, and critical decisions have yet to be made. Museum officials plan to eliminate two 30-foot-high galleries that were part of the original proposal to add wall space and cut costs. This is unfortunate: the soaring spaces would tie the building together vertically and create voids on the upper floors that would add to the sense of mystery.

The museum is also pushing to make the curved corners in the galleries more compact to add still more wall space, which could create an impression that the art is crammed in.

For decades now, Mr. Ito has ranked among the leading architects who have reshaped the field by infusing their designs with the psychological, emotional and social dimensions that late Modernists and Post-Modernists ignored. They have replaced an architecture of purity with one of emotional extremes. The underlying aim is less an aesthetic one than a mission to create a more elastic, and therefore tolerant, environment.

These ideas have found their firmest footing in Europe and Japan and are now filtering into the mainstream here. It would be a shame to leave Mr. Ito out of that cultural breakthrough. The museum would not only be an architectural tour de force but would also introduce him to a broad American audience, stirring an imaginative reawakening in a country that sorely needs it.

[Kang.Lin]

"The real challenge is how to make a slanted curve wall being a bearing wall," I say. "It requires a complete system of structural integrating for both static and dynamic loadings."


"Its leaning and supporting actions are contradicting. The form is new, showing a sensuous feel of Welcoming!! However it is only for an architectural appearance. In shipbuilding, as for the engineering, its exterior curved shape is formed to reduce the moving water resistance; and its curved plane is subjected to the water pressure normal to it, not for an in-plane compression. For vertical load bearing the ship still relies upon its beam and column framing system."


"Frankly I cannot image that the proposed 5 inch steel-concrete sandwich wall can overcome its slenderness and support the floors without buckling, if it does not bond together the layers. Have you ever weight yourself on an egg-carton and test its strength? You will be surprised!"

"Last, how to build a perfect composite sandwich wall is another difficulty. To fill concrete into the three inch gap between two- one inch steel plates without air bobbles is hard. It needs a genius to solve. Instead, I prefer to re-position the layers, if you ask for my opinion. I kindly recommend thus: [Place the one inch steel plate (ribbed) in the middle; then cover it by guniting concrete on each face, two inches.] Such that it can become a fire-proof partition, beside it works as a bearing wall as well."