Ito on My Mind(s)

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

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.

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.

More on the Ito design coming up.