The SFMOMA and the deYoung: Two American Planning Traditions

 

SFMOMA, Composite Drawing

 

At the end of Memorial Day weekend, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art officially closed its doors for a 3 year renovation and expansion, estimated at $300m - $500m.  Living downtown, I've always felt the SFMOMA to be my local museum. It's a 15 minute walk from my building. It's the museum I joined when I moved here, much like I joined New York City's MoMA when I moved there after college.

The closure was announced over a year ago, as it became clear that the museum would able to successfully raise half a billion dollars for the project in mid-recession. With the impending closure of my local, I knew I'd need to look elsewhere for a high-culture fix. So I joined the deYoung museum, which has a co-membership with the Legion of Honor - together they operate as the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.  Both of these art museums have mediocre permanent collections but host excellent touring exhibitions, usually including one fashion-oriented blockbuster per year.

With the SFMOMA about to close, it is worth considering these two museums at this moment in time. For years I've thought that the SFMOMA was a much better building than the de Young Museum. Actually they're both excellent buildings, and I realized that their architecture is intrinsically and inextricably linked to their locations. And their architectural design and site planning exemplify two long-standing traditions of architecture and planning, in the Western tradition and in the American tradition.

Locating the Institutions

The SFMOMA, completed in 1994, is located in downtown San Francisco on 3rd Street between Mission and Howard Streets, in the South-of Market, or SOMA, area. The building is footsteps from Market Street, from hotels, and from multi-modal transit facilities including city and intercity bus, street car, trolley car, and BART. Access to this museum couldn't be easier - there are even a few multi-story parking garages within a block for those who like to drive to downtown destinations. SOMA is a flat area of the city planned in the mid/later 19th century with large urban blocks and wide streets, thought to facilitate business and industry. In contrast, the deYoung, completed in 2005, is located in the middle of San Francisco's Golden Gate park, a 1000-acre public park on the west side of the city - a park 20% bigger than New York's Central Park and planned by William Hammond Hall John McLaren. The deYoung forms the north/western side of classical public esplanade grounds - the music concourse, centered on a bandshell, with the newly reopened California Academy of Sciences forming the south/eastern side. There is some underground parking for those going in cars. Otherwise the public transit gets tricky, with a few bus lines going somewhat close to the general area of the park where the museum is located.

Site Planning: On the Street and In the Park

Two things can make a building specific for a place: the site planning and the architectural design. In their site panning, these two museums exemplify two long-standing traditions of planning in the Western humanist tradition: the civil urban neighbor and the independent expressive ranger. Or, the chorus and the soloist.
The SFMOMA was planned to anchor an arts centered redevelopment area in downtown San Francisco. Currently set amidst hotel and condo towers, ground floor retail shops, and other institutions, the museum is placed along the street, at that back of the sidewalk, so that its façade forms part of a street wall that now includes, along its block, the St. Regis and W Hotels. The street frontage includes the main entry, the design store gift shop, and Café Museo. Sitting under a loggia, these are perfectly suited for their highly-trafficked location. The SFMOMA is a good urban building. The deYoung, on the other hand, is a rural building. Although part of a larger ensemble, it is essentially a giant folly in a lush green park. Once you get beyond the planar façade facing the concourse, the building's awkward massing and obtuse programmatic distribution make the relationship with its site an afterthought. The gift shop is half buried, the café half inside and half outside, and the galleries are disorientating at every turn. While some clever devices are used to bring landscape into the building, it reads as artificial and contrived. The building could just as easily be spun around 180 degrees, or moved to Napa or to San Diego's Balboa Park.

Designing For Place

Architectural design can also make a building specific for a place, whether the site planning is complementary or resistant. A building can be built using local materials, or it can use forms and configurations that have found fluency in the region. In design, a new building can include the familiar, either through quotation or interpretation.

We may wonder if a piece or architecture should be specific to its place. Is this a valued quality? What are the merits of building in a way that is locally informed? Are the local patterns worth repeating or even referencing? And haven't the building cultures of most places been influenced by other places? After all, renaissance classicism and mid-war European modernism became the two most widespread and interpreted languages across the globe. They can be at once local and international.
The value of a place-specific building must rest in the value of the place. For all its diversity, the City of San Francisco has a young but conservative building culture, and pan-economic interests have emphasized the ongoing civic, cultural, and economic value of the character of the city, of its buildings and its neighborhoods, and how they relate to the hills and to the waterfront. The building culture here privilege continuity over change, refinement over reinvention. In a place like San Francisco, place-specific design matters. It’s important for the site planning, and it’s important for the architecture.

Facades for Galleries: Skin-deep Brick and Dimpled Copper

The SFMOMA and the deYoung Museum are very similar in program. Both institutions present themselves, and their collections, in a series of white-walled galleries, with supporting spaces - café, gift shop, auditorium. Both museums are organized around a grand stair hall, with gallery sequences that bring you back to the stair hall.

The deYoung has features of historic museums and civic buildings - features also of the museum that it replaced - like a tower, a courtyard, a grand arrival hall, and formal gardens. In the case of the deYoung, each of these elements is exquisitely done, a special event, a singular piece unrelated to the others. The dramatically twisting tower is almost detached from the museum. The sealed museum is, in turn, not allowed to interact with the surrounding gardens. The courtyard is a bleak space, intimate in scale yet cold and desolate. One wonders, with so much rich material available for inspiration, for interpretation, for dialogue and contradistinction, why would this museum be configured in such a way that is so alien to this place? Why would a dimpled copper facade, wrapping all sides of the building so that it appears windowless, alien, and unwelcoming, be an appropriate design idea, or design solution, for San Francisco's city-scaled garden on the Pacific? The museum makes bold statements about site, context, program and place; but are these lessons worth repeating? Bay Area architects are unsure is this building reinforced the trend of subpar performance by out-of-town and international architects, or if the deYoung finally ended the long dreary run.

More optimistically, I think San Francisco has received some truly fine pieces of architecture from talented guest practitioners, beginning a century ago with the Panama Pacific Exposition of 1915 and the construction of the Civic Center. The trajectory includes the dazzling Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. Mary by Pietro Belluschi, the Performing Arts Center at Yerba Buena by James Stuart Polshek, and the Gap Building and the Federal Building, fine office buildings by Robert A.M. Stern and Morphosis, respectively.

And the SFMOMA fits in this latter tradition of very fine buildings. The building works at an urban level, the massing is civic and monumental in scale, using large rectangular forms to define a street wall. The program is correctly distributed for its site, with the most public spaces offered to the visitor: the iconic stair hall is a living room for the city, with events and art installations and people from all over.  The ground level café, gift shop and auditorium keep the space animated. And the architecture of the building articulates and reinforces the institution's civic role and civil manners. The exterior walls are made if a thin layer of bricks which add a fine texture to the otherwise plain and windowless urban walls. Special attention is given to the corners and floor levels. The building steps back at the upper levels, providing space for skylights and modest areas for roof decks, and allowing the giant cylinder drum of the stair hall to be exposed and legible on the skyline. This feature is first visible on approach from the gardens across the street, and then is recognized as you move into the building and through the sunlight-filter atrium. The drum reemerges when, after visiting the galleries, you cross the truss bridge near the top of the sliced drum, and emerge on an outdoor terrace overlooking the garden where you started. The visual sequence is complete, the journey is legible. The metaphorical quest - emerging from the garden to be enlightened though the artifacts of civic culture - has come full circle.

Nature, the Swiss and the City

The deYoung Museum is a sophisticated piece of architecture, set within sumptuous grounds, set within a giant urban park. The museum responds to nature with a simultaneous embrace and withdrawal. The courtyard and vitrines capture nature but treat it like an exhibit. While any place will do, Golden Gate Park will do just fine as a location for this big box with exquisite cladding.
The SFMOMA offers another take on designing for a specific place. It is at once a foreground and background building. The SFMOMA is monumental yet humane, and surprisingly porous for a vessel of fragile objects. The building makes a virtue out of what could be seen as obvious, expected, and proper. The building allows its role in contributing to making a place in the city stand on equal ground with its role as the address of the foremost modern art museum west of the Hudson River.

These two buildings, designed by gifted Swiss architects at the height of their careers, offer valuable lessons about architecture, site planning, and the challenges of designing - in the park, and in the city.