Columns

Next Tuesday morning, UC’s Berkeley Art Museum will host a public discussion of goals for its planned new downtown site. Attending will be Toyo Ito, the Tokyo architect whom the museum has engaged to design its new building. With this internationally renowned designer on board, and a downtown location on the map, BAM and its visitors face exciting possibilities. 

But surprisingly, the firmest foundation for this new museum sits neglected in plain view: the UC Printing Plant building that currently occupies part of the project site, at the corner of Oxford and Virginia streets. By preserving and adapting this existing structure, UC could provide the community with a truly ideal museum. 

The Printing Plant building has unique and irreplaceable historic value. In 1945, it printed the original United Nations Charter. For a community with Berkeley’s values, there is no structure more deserving of preservation. Its demolition would be a tragic loss. 

But just as importantly, the Printing Plant has inherent potential to be a really great museum space. It could be the next Tate Modern Art Gallery—the London sensation whose architects later won their profession’s highest honor, the Pritzker Prize. 

The Tate is a converted electric power station. It was originally constructed in 1947, eight years after UC’s Printing Plant. The buildings are in similar styles, with facades that feature embossed columns. 

When our city declared the UC Printing Plant a historic landmark in 2004, it cited its role in printing the UN Charter. But the landmarking also recognized the building’s front office block as a superior example of 1930s architecture. Local buildings in this “New Deal Moderne” style are few, and diminishing. 

The building’s working area, at the rear, was almost designed for conversion to museum galleries. It gets gentle natural lighting from north-facing “sawtooth” skylights, and from south-facing glass blocks. This kind of diffuse natural lighting blesses several museums that were successfully converted from industrial uses. 

My favorite is the one where I really learned to love museum-going: the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s (MOCA) Geffen Contemporary gallery. This is a red-brick building that star architect Frank Gehry adapted from earlier uses as a warehouse and hardware store. 

When I first walked into MOCA on a university assignment, it shattered my stereotypes of museums. I’d thought museums were still, stuffy, reverential places. But the “Temporary Contemporary” (as it was then known) was daylit, wide-open, and welcoming. It had the vibrancy of lofts where art actually gets made. 

“Hey,” I thought. “This place is too much fun.” I ran back every time a new show opened there. 

And a rather large city agreed with my assessment. L.A. residents loved this “temporary” museum so much that it has become permanent—even after MOCA completed a long-awaited signature building by another star architect. 

The UC Printing Plant has the potential to become just this kind of lively, inviting museum space. But it occupies only part of the site that UC has reserved for this museum. The lot just to its north, now home to a parking garage, could host a new and very different building. 

Ito is an innovative architect whose designs deliberately challenge ideas of structural permanence and outside/inside separation. With the interplay of venerable and new structures on this block, his first major American commission could give Berkeley something really striking.  

And given the Printing Press’ unique heritage—as a sort of “Ark of the Covenant” for the United Nations Charter—we might gain a truly profound monument to postwar ideals of peace and international cooperation. 

UC is a big institution with a complex mission. Part of that mission is operating the world’s two leading design laboratories for weapons of mass destruction (at Livermore and Los Alamos). 

You’d think UC leaders would take at least equal pride in the university’s small role in establishing the United Nations—an organization designed to ensure that nuclear weapons were never used again. You’d think they’d want to preserve the humble temple at the corner of Oxford and Center Streets. 

Like the United Nations itself, the Printing Plant isn’t perfect. It needed work even before UC recently shuttered it—leaving it subject to vandalism and decay. The graffiti now marring the UN plaque near the doorway is an awful shame. 

But like the United Nations, this building is irreplaceable. It’s done a lot of good over the years. And it has great promise for fulfilling a new, ever more demanding mission. 

Michael Katz is a Berkeley civic watchdog.