Toyo Ito in Berkeley — No Go

Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive (rendering), Toyo Ito, 2008/Images: Toyo Ito and Associates

They tell us the Great Recession is in retreat, though it may not feel that way if you're unemployed. Even if it is, on the way out the door it took down a project I was looking forward to. Earlier this week the University of California at Berkeley announced that it was giving up on its plan to build a new home for the Berkeley Art Museum and the Pacific Film Archive, with a design from the Japanese architect Toyo Ito that would have been his first in the U.S.

The Berkeley Museum was a project that has had its ups and downs, literally. It was first conceived at three stories. But when I stopped by the office of Museum Director Larry Rinder in September of last year, not long after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the stock market debacle that went with it, it had been scaled back to two.

Then I met with Rinder again in January in New York, this time with Ito, and it was back to three. Rinder told me at the time that the museum had cash and pledges of about $80 million towards what was then its goal of $184 million and that about $20 million of that had been raised since the market drop. But in The San Francisco Chronicle yesterday Rinder said that by this month the capital campaign had brought in $81 million towards an enlarged goal of $200 million — which seems to mean that over the past ten months the campaign had pretty much stalled.

In what you might think of as related news, in the face of brutal state budget cuts, the regents of the University of California voted yesterday to increase undergraduate fees — their term for tuition — a whopping 32%.