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No Ordeal. The new Oakland museum, by Connecticut's Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo, is a design of an altogether different order. It not only successfully incorporates many different civic functions but bids fair to become a landmark for city planners and architects. Chosen in 1961 to design a project in downtown Oakland that would combine three local museums with class rooms and a theater, Roche and Dinkeloo concluded that the busy area needed "a parklike environment, not just another monumental building." They were also touched by the fact that the construction would be financed by a voter-approved city bond issue. As they well knew, the average man at the polls tends to regard museumgoing as a duty rather than a pleasure.
Roche and Dinkeloo therefore set out to create a museum that would not be "an ordeal of physical endurance," but "a pleasant, relaxing, informative experience." The three museums (devoted to California ecology, cultural history and art) are buried, in three successive tiers, under interlacing steps, shady passageways, grass plots, trees and a reflecting pool. The result reminds its director, J. S. Holliday, of "a Mayan temple" and other observers of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The museum will be open to the public next spring, when its exhibits are installed.
Negative Space. American architects are becoming so accomplished at museum design that they are even winning commissions overseas. "We wanted the architect with the greatest experience," says Joachim von Moltke, director of the Kunsthalle in Bielefeld, West Germany, in explaining the selection of Philip Johnson, who has built six museums. Though working far from home, Johnson scaled the Kunsthalle to the small German park and six-story buildings of Bielefeld, and, for the facade, used red German sandstone, which lends a welcome note of warmth in Bielefeld's rainy climate.
"I think that the ideal museum is a negative space to make the works of art look good," says Johnson. Within the severe, almost mausoleum-like exterior, he has given Von Moltke plenty of space in which to build a collection. To West Germans, Johnson also made the museum revolutionary by adding such "American" features as a children's room, an auditorium and a cafe overlooking the park. "In the first four weeks, we have had 20,000 visitors," says Von Moltke. "In our old quarters, we used to get about 5,000 a year."
English Eccentric. No museum this year has drawn more fire than London's new Hayward Art Gallery, the fortress that opened this summer in the Greater London Council's South Bank Arts Center, across the Thames from Parliament. A jungle of raw "brutalist" forms, the gallery makes no attempt to hide its concrete components from the elements. Traylike open decks display sculptures—and afford fine views. Yet the building is not quite so practical as it seems. The outside stairs and ramps look as though they ought to lead up to entrances, but only one does. The rest are part of a labyrinthine set of walkways that connect the gallery with its neighboring concert hall and the Waterloo Bridge.