The New SFMOMA
Founded in 1935 as the first American West Coast museum devoted to modern and contemporary art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is set to reopen this month after having being closed since June 2013.
We visited the space, experiencing how the art is presented and viewed in the environmentally and community conscious space.
Purpose-built to showcase the museum’s celebrated collection, the building has expanded its original form designed by Mario Botta in 1995, rather than demolishing its old structure. Its new design, which was brought to life by Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta, is intended to integrate more seamlessly into San Francisco, encourage a warm, open invitation to the San Francisco public, and be more environmentally conscious specifically through its exclusive use of LED lighting—and the first American museum to do so.
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Three entrances to the building, including the new entrance from Howard Street, allow for a more engaging, gathering space around the museum, which produces more pedestrian traffic. The new entrances and framework for the museum help develop a more interactive relationship with the city and its people. The outward facing exterior of the building work as a homage to the foggy weather and waves of the Bay Area through its play on daylight against shadows on its fiberglass reinforced polymer panels. The panels mimic the fluid movements of the weather and water. The outdoor spaces and windows inside the museum overlooking impressive views of the city allowing for an enjoyable and pleasant perception of San Francisco, linking the museum and the city smoothly and naturally. With these spaces and views, the museum is seen as a more cohesive part of this larger network of San Francisco and is very much relevant and analogous to the city.
The iconic eastern façade of the Snøhetta-designed expansion comprises of more than 700 uniquely shaped and locally fabricated fiberglass reinforced polymer panels. Throughout the day, the movement of light and shadow naturally animates the rippled surface. Silicate crystals from Monterey County embedded in the surface catch and reflect the changing light.
Outdoor areas such as the largest public living wall on the 3rd floor of the Pat and Bill Wilson Sculpture Terrace as well as the maple-faced Roman steps outside provide casual and easily accessible gathering areas for the public, thus, attracting more people. The wall has more than 19,000 plants and 21 native species. The appealing and warm atmosphere surrounding the museum as well as its active engaging demeanor with San Francisco show an engaged, but familiar SFMOMA that is expected to both thrive and give new energy to the city.
Connections to the surrounding neighborhood and city were carefully considered, along with bringing the benefits of landscape and the outdoors to the museum spaces. New pedestrian pathways around the museum and a new public entrance on Howard Street better integrate SFMOMA into the South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood and activate the surrounding streetscape.
The expansion consists of revamped spaces—both indoor and outdoor—totaling 170,000 square feet. The museum works to successfully reach its goal of enhancing its welcome to the public and displaying a more inviting, open area through free public access to the ground floor galleries, which are about 45,000 square feet in total, and by offering free admission to museum visitors aged 18 and under.
The SFMOMA collection itself boasts more than 33,000 works of art encompassing painting, sculpture, new media, architecture and design, and photography as well as a groundbreaking 100-year partnership to show the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection, one of the world’s greatest private collections of postwar and contemporary art. Among the 260 selections on view from the Fisher Collection at the opening are important works of American abstraction, Pop, Minimal and figurative art by artists such as Chuck Close, Ellsworth Kelly, Lee Krasner, Roy Lichtenstein, Agnes Martin and Andy Warhol; works of German art after the 1960s by such artists as Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter; a broad range of Alexander Calder works from the late 1920s to the late 1960s; and sculpture by leading British artists including Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Barbara Hepworth and Richard Long.
The SFMOMA now has three times as much gallery space and will open with 19 special exhibitions and have its first display of over 600 works from its Campaign for Art program. Through Campaign for Art, the SFMOMA has had over 230 donors promise 3,000 works. The newly designed building also displays the new Pritzker Center for Photography, which is the largest exhibition, analytical, and study area devoted to photography among American Art Museums.
The SFMOMA will open to the public on Saturday 14 May 2016.
Research by Perwana Nazif.
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