Years ago, when I first entered the Berkeley Art Museum on the University of California campus, I was stunned by the heroic volume—open, skylit, tough. Ten years later, I met the architect, Mario Ciampi (1907-2006) at a fund-raising event and asked him about the powerful space he made. He said he simply wanted a building relevant to students’ lives. To me, the museum, completed in 1970, was one of two major post-World War II structures in the East Bay (the other being Kevin Roche’s Oakland Museum of California). I never thought of it as Brutalist, as such buildings were heavily grounded with exposed structure. Ciampi’s competition-winning art museum absolutely defied gravity, particularly in seismic California, with its massive concrete volumes suspended above the street and gardens with no visible support. At its essence, it is a building that is both timeless and of its period, expressing its use in a singular way, much like Breuer’s Whitney or Wright’s Guggenheim.