CCA News
Make Yourself at Home in Thom Faulders's Cozy BAMscape
Posted on Friday, January 29, 2010, by Brenda Tucker
BAMscape, an installation created by CCA Architecture associate professor Thom Faulders for the central atrium of the Berkeley Art Museum, is an 1,550-square-foot sculpture/furniture/stage that invites direct physical interaction, with undulating curves for people to relax against and multiple electric outlets for plugging in laptops. Museum visitors, students, art lovers, and performance attendees are all invited to make themselves at ease here; even sitting with your coffee is OK, as it has been designed to withstand spills. Faulders calls BAMscape "a new social nerve center" for the museum.
Faulders studied human bodies in reclining positions to create the comfortable bends and arches in his grand, luminously orange creation. The interior walls that usually subdivide the atrium have been removed, opening it up and revealing the wall of windows on the west side. This allows both a rediscovery of the original architecture by Mario Ciampi and a dynamic interaction between the building's forceful, angular geometry and the curves of BAMscape.
BAM/PFA Director Larry Rinder declared, "All of us at BAM/PFA want to make the most out of the Mario Ciampi building before we depart, as our stay here is not indefinite. Thom's piece activates the dramatic 7,000-square-foot atrium space in a remarkable way, encouraging students and other museumgoers to spend time here relaxing, studying, chatting, enjoying musical events and other performances, and simply taking in the remarkable architecture around them. Thom was the ideal person to reimagine what this space could be and to develop an extraordinary multipurpose design."
Four semi trucks transported the plywood sections from the fabricator in Sunnyvale to the museum. Each of the 135 modules is unique. Fastened together, they form a "skin" over a core of foam.
"I chose the color orange to warm up the space and make it POP," said Faulders. "The particular shade of orange is inspired by a Hans Hofmann painting in one of the adjacent galleries." Hofmann (1880–1966) was a renowned Abstract Expressionist, active mostly in the 1950s and 1960s. The Berkeley Art Museum was founded in 1963 as a direct result of his donation of 45 paintings and $250,000 to the University of California at Berkeley.
Through his East Bay firm Faulders Studio, Thom Faulders combines functional design with research and experimental projects. He is particularly interested, he says, in "dynamic relationships between users and environments." He has won numerous awards and accolades throughout his career; in 2009 he was a winner of the Rising Tides competition sponsored by the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, and he received the New Practices Award from the American Institute of Architecture. His recent exhibitions include Architecture and Lace, Maison de l'Architecture et de la Ville, Euralille, France, (2009); Sensate: Bodies and Design, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2009); New Practices San Francisco, Center for Architecture, New York (2009); Camp: Reconsidered, 3A Garage, San Francisco (2008); and Flexibility: Design In a Fast-Changing Society, Torino World Design Capitol, Italy (2008).