While the addition can initially look awkward, as if a big flat spaceship had alighted on the building, it promises to wear well, because the interior spaces are varied and unfold with logic and surprises. This may be Scofidio, Diller & Renfro’s best museum design and possibly cause for optimism about its work on the Museum of Modern Art, although the bones it is working with there are not so good.

“Architecture of Life” is not your father’s theme show in that its organizational principle is not a literary conceit but a visual phenomenon: It centers on form as an essential fact of existence, inherent in all human activities, throughout nature, explored by scientists, pursued by painters and composers. At a moment when form receives short shrift from younger artists, it plays out here in architectural models and plans, and in works by artists familiar and not. Here are Wilson Bentley’s photographs of snowflakes from the 1920s; Ernst Haeckel’s drawings of oceanic protozoa (from around 1860) and Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s lacy ink drawings of gray matter in the cerebral cortex, from the turn of the 20th century. And there are several spectacular examples of real lace, mostly from 16th- and 17th-century Italy, lent by the Lacis Museum of Lace and Textiles in Berkeley.

Mr. Rinder has cashed in chips far and wide. The show includes several Pomo baskets from the university’s museum of anthropology and turned-wood bowls by Bob Stockdale from the Oakland Museum of California, along with the improvisational quilts of Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936-2006), from Oakland, one of this country’s least-known great artists. European loans include Johannes Itten’s abstract painting “Encounter” (1916), which depicts the color spectrum as a spiral, and Gustav Caillebotte’s 1876 Impressionist masterpiece “Pont de l’Europe,” depicting a massive bridge in Paris.

Everything mirrors and enhances everything else in this superb show. Between the Berkeley museum’s new home and its inspired initial use of its galleries, its future looks very bright.