Open mind: For Toyo Ito, transparency is more than glass walls. With his first American commission, he wants to blur the distinction between interior and exterior, insider and outsider.
Marcus Hanschen

Centuries after being built, a Gothic cathedral sends its stone spires heavenward in timeless aspiration. The woman reading a letter in a Vermeer oil bends over her task in the very bar of sunlight that first glazed the right side of her face. A ceramic bust of the late George Moscone by Robert Arneson bristles with the same audacity it had when first unveiled, just as a desert photograph by Richard Misrach preserves its enveloping sense of place.

Art, wherever it comes from, makes an immediate and powerful appeal to our physical nature. In its temporal persistence and seeming immutability it drops an anchor in time's deep, wide ocean. Reassuring as that may be, solidity is finally not what captures us when we look at a great building or painting, sculpture or photograph. The light filtering through stained glass in the apse at Chartres, the transitory pulse of daily life in a Vermeer interior, Arneson's cartoonish japes, and the chromatic delicacy of Misrach's sun-baked colors shimmer with diaphanous veils of meaning and uncertainty, implication and ambiguity. That's what finally connects us to art's complexity and fathomless wonder.

When Japanese architect Toyo Ito's sublime and cunningly conceived new home for the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive opens in 2013, the University and the Bay Area will have a magnet building that not only invites that sort of fluid interaction with art but positively embodies it. Built on a self-supporting system of ribbon-thin steel-and-cement white curtain walls that bend, ripple, and part through three latticework floors, the new building will conjure an alluring cloudlike presence, blur traditional borders, and invite a spacious, unbounded experience of art. BAM/PFA director Lawrence Rinder anticipates a "tremendously lively hub of culture and human engagement."

In an era of main-event art museums that assert themselves as massive sculptural forms—Frank Gehry's swooping, steel-armored Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; Daniel Libeskind's craggy, eruptive expansion of the Denver Art Museum; Herzog and de Meuron's copper-clad and keenly planed de Young Museum in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park—Ito's design proposes a kind of radical, self-effacing transparency.

That's not to suggest the new BAM/PFA won't be a beautiful building in its own right. Poised on a site now occupied by an abandoned printing plant, the Berkeley museum figures to be a lithe and graceful focal point for what is currently an anonymous no-man's-land between campus and downtown Berkeley. But its real achievement comes in the deployment of space, light, and permeable boundaries that seek to lay bare the museum- going experience and, in doing so, propose new vistas and possibilities.

Ito's use of porous, interpenetrating spaces merges ideally with the institution's broad and somewhat idiosyncratic art collection, and with multidisciplinary programming that ranges from traditional Asian calligraphy to German Expressionism to contemporary film, video, and digital works. Ito's see-through museum is meant to open eyes, ears, and sensibilities to connections, correspondences, and provocative contradictions. It reflects the very nature of art, the oscillations of the "indestructible and the ephemeral," as Rinder puts it.

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