Arts & Events

Northern and southern Europe come together in a not totally comfortable way in the design of the newly expanded San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which will open on May 14 after a three-year closure. The new addition designed by Snøhetta, a firm which originated in Norway but now operates out of New York, is attached to and behind the original building designed by the Italian Swiss architect Mario Botta. 

Botta established his reputation through the designs of elegant country villas in the pre-Alpine Swiss canton of Ticino. His buildings are characterized by their carefully detailed red brick exteriors and frequent use of bilateral symmetry. Snøhetta is perhaps best known in the United States for their National September 11 Memorial Museum Pavilion at the edge of the World Trade Center. Like their earlier Oslo Opera House, this museum is the antithesis of symmetry or for that matter right angles. Everything but the floor planes seems to be leaning. At the opera house even the roof plane becomes a great sloping and accessible plaza. One wonders what SFMOMA was trying to do when they invited these Nordic designers to add to their original museum in such a different idiom. Botta’s villas seem to come directly from a classic Palladian tradition. Snøhetta’s designs are steeped in irregular natural forms (see their website, snohetta.com, or think of an Alvar Aalto vase). 

The original Botta building, on Third Street facing the open space of Yerba Buena Gardens, is a rigorously symmetrical ziggurat of red brick surmounted by a truncated cylindrical skylight, which, despite San Francisco’s skyscraper boom, can still be spotted from parts of the elevated freeway to the south of downtown. The street entry leads into a multi-story atrium under the skylight. 

The new addition is behind the existing museum on an interior parcel which has a small frontage on Howard Street. It consists of a series of stacked rectangular galleries big enough to more than double the museum exhibit areas and to show off the recently acquired Fisher Collection, which is so large that entire galleries are named for one artist (Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, Ellsworth Kelly). Above these public galleries are several floors for museum administration.  

On the exterior of the addition Snøhetta has clad what is basically a stack of boxes in a curvy wall of panels made of pale gray fiber-reinforced plastic. The walls are said to be inspired by San Francisco’s fogs and the bay area’s rolling hills. The cladding gives no clues as to what is going on inside, but then, it is hard to see the new building from street level; the best view is probably on the museum’s website. Nonetheless, comparison with the exterior appearance of two recent New York City museums with similar high-rise programs is inevitable. The New Museum in the Bowery piles its windowless galleries one above the other and slightly out of alignment, like a giant stack of boxes as you might carry them from the attic. The new building for the Whitney Museum of American Art on the lower Westside is a gutsy nautically inspired structural exercise, which clearly tells the outside viewer what is inside. No one complains that the shiny steel exterior of Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall in LA has no relationship to the rectangular concrete box which actually houses the concert hall, so perhaps I shouldn’t complain that Snøhetta’s walls have nothing to do with what’s inside. 

The best parts of Snøhetta’s design relate to interior circulation. The new galleries are linked by a series of elegant oak staircases which are subtly narrowed as they ascend and dramatically illuminated by strip lighting hidden under the steps. (Curiously the layout of these staircases is incorrectly shown in the museum visitor’s guide.) These staircases are the best part of the new building, better by far than the fractal-like irregular bleachers at the Howard Street entrance, which--again an inevitable comparison—contrast poorly to the rugged but evenly spaced bleachers in the entry of the new Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive. The Howard Street entrance is almost as big as the Third Street entrance in the original building but seems cold and lifeless, despite being filled with an enormous Richard Serra sculpture.  

Snøhetta also succeeded in the difficult job of relating the five story elevators of the old building to the seven story elevators of the new. Both elevator banks are distinguished by a different color (red, silver) and both banks open to the same large lobby on each floor. Where the Snøhetta circulation scheme fails is in the remodel of the old staircase in the atrium at the Third Street entry. Botta’s grand stone staircase perfectly on axis with the entry doors has been replaced with a zigzag oak staircase that fights with its setting and seems to suggest nothing more than architectural one-upmanship.  

One might ask finally why Snøhetta or anyone from out of town was invited to do an addition which, while huge, is really almost invisible behind the façade of the original building. San Francisco and the Bay Area don’t lack for talented architects. In fact EHDD, the local partner for BAMPFA, has been awarded the American Institute of Architects award for best firm. Did the cultural mandarins of the city feel that they had to find a European “starchitect” to compete with the new DeYoung (designed by a Swiss firm), the expanded California Academy of Sciences, and the Asian Art Museum (both designed by Italians)? San Francisco exports a lot of architectural skill (the local branch of Skidmore Owings and Merrill has planned entire cities in China). Why don’t local cultural institutions recognize their local talent?