- Photo by Christopher Richard
The Oakland Museum of California was the first major project undertaken by Pritzker-Prize-Winning architect Kevin Roche. He envisioned the museum as an urban park, integrating the gallery spaces with terraced gardens. Construction of the museum began in February of 1964 with the driving of pilings into what had once been a marshy inlet. The museum was completed in 1968 and opened with its collections in place in 1969. The building – which occupies 7.7 acres on 4 city blocks and includes four levels of terraced gardens – was immediately acclaimed as a milestone in museum design.
Landscape architect Dan Kiley designed the museum’s gardens as a “contemporary attempt to produce hanging gardens that in scale and magnitude will resemble those of ancient Mesopotamia.” By introducing plants of various textures and growing habits throughout the garden, Kiley planned a garden that would compliment and soften the rigid geometry of the structure.
