Provocative Museum

Perched on a sloping site across from the main campus, it looks like a giant poker-hand of five concrete slabs, fanning down the hill. After six years of planning and construction, the University of California at Berkeley last week proudly opened its new $4.8 million University Art Museum with all the ritual speeches, plus an exhibition drawn mostly from California collections and modestly entitled "Excellence."

The result is a building of genuine architectural distinction that also poses some provocative suggestions for the shape of museums in the future. Its designers are three San Francisco architects, Mario Ciampi, 63, Richard Jorasch, 34, and Ronald Wagner, 31. Says Ciampi: "We are people willing to trust our irrational side. There was a lot of trusting of instincts in this building." There was also a bow in the direction of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum. As in the Guggenheim, visitors move from level to level in a flow of curving space. But the tyranny Wright imposed with his irresistible, continuous spiral has been avoided at Berkeley.

One enters on a middle level and is given choices: up one floor to the permanent display of 45 paintings by Hans Hofmann—a bequest to the museum from his estate—or down to the free exhibition space on areas below. The floors are broken but connected by ramps, so that viewers move slowly downward through a constantly shifting interior, accented by promontories of raw concrete that jut over the halls like ships' prows. Says Director Peter Selz: "You devise ways and means of installing an exhibit to detain people, to keep them from moving on. Here we made cul-de-sacs and all kinds of things to keep people in front of a painting." Selz, 51, who quit his post as a curator of the Museum of Modern Art in 1965 to go to Berkeley, is delighted with the building. "I was so tired of boxlike spaces," he explains. "Many architects want to create a neutral space and have it evenly illuminated, but I say neutrality can be as boring for a painting as it is for a person."