Ito on My Mind(s)

Berkeley Art Museum (proposed), Toyo Ito, 2008/Images: Toyo Ito & Associates

A quick question to anyone here reading the blog at this hour: are you checking Tuned In wondering when the hell I'm going to post Lostwatch? Because here's the thing, I already wrote it. Sometimes I write it up as soon as I watch, sometimes the next morning. But even when I write it immediately after the show, I generally schedule it to post the next morning, or at least after the show ends Pacific time, on the assumption that our friends in other time zones would like me to wait and that no one's out there waiting to debate Lost in the middle of the night anyway. But it occurs to me that I've never asked. Let me know if you have a preference. Mind you, most often Lostwatch won't be up until the next morning anyway, because having two kids has effectively sucked the night-owlishness out of me. In the meantime, ~~keep hitting refresh~~ get some sleep! Lostwatch will be up in the morning.

You could call it the last word in multi-tasking. Yesterday morning, while part of my brain was casting forward to the imminent inauguration of Barack Obama, the other part sat down with Larry Rinder, director of the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, and Toyo Ito, the Japanese architect of a new BAM/PFA that’s scheduled to open in 2013. I needed to make sure I caught the inaugural oath, but I was intent on meeting with Ito, whose multi-story Tod store in Tokyo, one of his many projects in Japan, has stayed with me for years as the most adroit blending of the rational and the lyrical in a retail space since Louis Sullivan’s Carson Pirie Scott store in Chicago.

The Berkeley museum is his first effort in the U.S. When his design was unveiled last March, months before the Great Financial Meltdown, it was conceived at three stories. But by September, when I stopped by Rinder’s office in Berkeley to look over some drawings and models, the project had been scaled back to two. So I was surprised that when I met with him and Ito yesterday the design had morphed back to three stories and 140,000 sq. ft. Surprised because this is not exactly a moment when museums are thinking big.

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But Rinder says that his museum now has cash and pledges of around $80 million towards its goal of $184 million — $140 million for construction — and that about $20 million of that amount has been raised since the market drop. So it’s back to the larger scheme, a direction we’re not likely to see many other projects take over the next few years. Can we do this? Yes (or at least maybe) we can.