Following more than a year of closure due to Covid, the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) announced that it would again welcome visitors starting on June 18. The reopening of the museum, with collections that encompass art, history, and the natural sciences, coincides with the completion of a $17.8 million revamp to the OMCA campus, delayed from 2020 due to the pandemic. The renovation is focused primarily on the terraced landscape that sits atop the Kevin Roche-designed building.
Soon after the museum first opened to the public in 1969, this magazine (April 1970) described the gardens, conceived by landscape architect Dan Kiley in collaboration with Roche, as containing “rich ground covers, colorful flowering shrubs, and indigenous trees.” But over the intervening years, the gardens were neglected, resulting in an environment that, in 2019, Oakland-based landscape architect Walter Hood characterized as becoming “duller and duller year after year.” Hood, along with architect Mark Cavagnero, led the renovation project. (Cavagnero was the architect for a comprehensive 2010 renovation that touched almost every aspect of the museum, except the gardens.)
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