The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) is a hybrid institution formed by the merger of two organizations affiliated with the University of California at Berkeley. The art museum was founded in 1963, spurred by artist Hans Hofmann’s donation of forty-five paintings. The Pacific Film Archive was established in 1967 as the center of the university’s film studies. Today, BAMPFA’s encyclopedic art collection contains more than twenty-two thousand artifacts representing hundreds of global cultures that flourished over the course of more than six thousand years. Its holdings include Ming dynasty and Qing dynasty paintings, Mughal dynasty miniatures, Baroque paintings, Old Master prints and drawings, early American paintings, African American quilts, nineteenth- and twentieth-century photography, conceptual art, and international contemporary art. The film and video collection contains more than sixteen thousand items, including original prints of West Coast avant-garde films, examples of early animation, Soviet cinema, video art, and the most extensive collection of Japanese films outside Japan. BAMPFA regularly hosts lectures by scholars and filmmakers. Housed since 1970 in a Brutalist building designed by architect Mario Ciampi, BAMPFA was forced to leave its iconic home in 1997 after it was deemed seismically unstable. The new BAMPFA, completed in 2016, now occupies the adaptive reuse of a 1939 Art Deco–style printing plant that sits on the border between the university campus and the city’s Downtown Arts District. The plant was famous for printing the first copies of the United Nations Charter.
Strategic excavations and surgical additions preserved the structure’s distinctive features while increasing its programmable area by 70 percent. The printing plant was gutted to create a lower level of galleries for lightsensitive collections. The versatile galleries at street level accommodate works from the collection alongside newly commissioned work by up-and-coming American and international artists. The original sawtooth skylights over the presses were dismantled and retrofitted with insulated, high-efficiency UV-filtering glass, with a shading capacity that keeps light levels at Class A gallery standards. Street-level windows were enlarged, putting the galleries on public display and simultaneously inviting the activity on the street and sidewalk to permeate the interior and the terraced performance forum. The existing Art Deco admin building at the corner of the site was renovated into a space for back-of-house support facilities and an art-making lab open to the community.
The Pacific Film Archive is housed in a stainless-steel-clad addition on the site of a demolished parking garage. The new thirty-five-thousand-square-foot structure, dubbed the Cipher, extends north–south to create a public spine that organizes all filmarchive programs. It also functions as lateral bracing to reinforce the structure per local seismic requirements. At the south end, the structure drapes across the press building to house a café and extends to form the building’s marquee and entrance canopy. The Cipher descends to meet the ground at the north face of the press building, revealing glimpses of the film library and study center, located below the sidewalk. Its two state-of-the-art theaters are equipped to accommodate all popular film formats, including digital, 35mm, and 16mm. The telescoping Cipher volume extends to the northern edge of the site, where it terminates with an outdoor viewing screen. The adjacent public plaza provides seating for daytime and nighttime film screenings.
