New Life for the Berkeley Art Museum Building

The Berkeley Art Museum (BAM) building was completed in 1970 and is an architecturally significant reinforced concrete building located on the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) campus. Originally designed by Architect Mario Ciampi, it is one of the most impressive examples of Brutalist architecture in the San Francisco Bay Area and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. As a result of seismic deficiencies exposed by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and subsequent studies that indicated the cost of a complete seismic retrofit would be similar to a full rebuild, the museum relocated to a new building in 2014, and the BAM building was left unoccupied. In 2016, the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) began a project to reuse the building as a full-service life sciences incubator. As a textbook example of successful adaptive reuse, the transformation of this landmark building incorporated a seismic retrofit into a complicated space, preserved the historic exposed concrete structure, replaced virtually all M/E/P/Fire systems, roofing, and skylights, and improved the building’s accessibility.