San Francisco’s MOMA Moment : Mario Botta designed an interior that is sublime. But what happened to the rest of the new museum?

The art museum, says noted Swiss architect Mario Botta, has replaced the cathedral as the embodiment of communal and spiritual values--or, in our secular age, as civic monument.

Indeed, if the museum building boom of the last decade or so is any indication, no self-respecting American city is complete these days without a new one. And now, with the opening of the new home that Botta designed for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the City by the Bay has joined the club.

The $60-million, 225,000-square-foot structure, Botta’s first U.S. building and his first major museum, was built in association with architects Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum. SFMOMA touts itself as the largest new American art museum of the decade and, with its 50,000 square feet of exhibition space, the second-largest single structure in the United States devoted to modern art.

(New York’s Museum of Modern Art, with 100,000 square feet of gallery space, is the largest single structure, while the nearly 80,000 combined square feet of Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art and its Temporary Contemporary put it in second place).

Certainly this new home is a welcome change for the San Francisco museum--which spent nearly six decades housed in cramped quarters in the Beaux Arts-style War Memorial Veterans Building in the city’s Civic Center--and for museum-goers as well. Finally, SFMOMA has a big, bold building of its own, on 3rd Street between Mission and Howard streets, overlooking the Moscone Center and the acclaimed Center for the Arts complex at Yerba Buena Gardens.

Right now in San Francisco, locations don’t come any more high profile than this one. And the 51-year-old Botta--who is known for his rigorously geometric, muscular designs for houses in the Ticino region of Switzerland, as well as for commercial and civic buildings in Europe and Japan--has gone the site one better.

“We told Mario we wanted a building with some significant exterior character,” recalls museum Director John R. Lane.

No problem there. On the outside, the museum’s massive--and we do mean massive-- brick facade, stepped back to give each floor the necessary roof area for skylights, is accented by horizontal stripes of black and white granite. They frame its entrance portal and wrap the cylindrical tower, with its angled skylight top, that crowns the building. Inside, under the skylight tower, a soaring atrium and dramatic staircase rise from the spacious lobby through four floors of galleries.

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This is architecture with a capital A. But is it a wonderful place in which to see art? And, given its very urban setting, does it make a significant contribution to the city?

First, the good news: SFMOMA is a more-than-wonderful place in which to see art. The museum’s galleries are elegantly proportioned, beautifully lighted and logically arranged. The architecture plays a key role in maintaining this sense of orientation yet never competes with the art on display.

To appreciate fully Botta’s orchestration of space, visitors should take the stairs, if possible, to ascend through the atrium. Each of the four exhibition floors has a different character, determined by the kind of art it displays and underscored by the proportions, lighting and layout of its galleries.

The second floor has an elegant sweep of skylighted 16-foot-high galleries, traditionally arranged on an axis, and houses the museum’s permanent collection of 20th-Century painting and sculpture. Also on this floor are the architecture and design galleries, where the exhibition “Mario Botta: The SFMOMA Project” offers a detailed look at the architect’s designs for the building. Since the third floor will display mainly photography and works on paper, it has lower ceilings, and it is the only floor that is entirely artificially lighted.

From the fourth floor, a flexible space devoted to temporary exhibitions, a double stair inserted between the inner and outer walls of the skylight tower leads to the fifth floor. There, visitors must cross a steel bowstring-truss bridge, under the skylight, to get to the gallery, a single, expansive 23-foot-high space that can accommodate large-scale works.

The bridge is a dramatic--even melodramatic--gesture, but the sensation of hovering in the cool white interior of the tower offers the museum-goer a meditative moment of visual respite. (Alas, my only visits to the museum have been on gray winter days. On a sunny summer day, the tower under that enormous skylight may be anything but cool.)

Botta seems perfectly at ease combining the modern approach to museum design (spare, minimally detailed gallery spaces) with the traditional (galleries organized around an atrium). A slender vertical slot window runs up the front of the building, framing views of the Yerba Buena Gardens, so that the visitor never loses a sense of relation to the city beyond. And the slot window is mirrored in the walls of the skylight tower, affording the fourth- and fifth-floor galleries a view into the atrium space, thus eliminating that fatiguing “where am I?” feeling. These are spaces that make the art look great and the viewer feel great.

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The building’s lobby and exterior, however, seem to pursue a different agenda: that of bamboozling visitors with an extravaganza of glitz.

Botta envisioned the lobby as a sort of indoor urban space, ostensibly necessary because of the neighborhood’s densely packed quality. It’s a disingenuous argument, however, since there is an extremely large and attractive open space--that of the Yerba Buena Gardens--right across the street, not to mention the museum’s own bookstore and urbane cafe, which are cleverly located right on 3rd Street, providing plenty of useful public gathering space while invaluably enlivening the neighborhood.

While it does indeed help to create the dramatic atrium, the lobby is more grandiose than grand, with its ceiling stepping up three different times--from the perplexingly small and dreary 14-foot-high entrance vestibule to the 31-foot-high middle level to the bottom of the skylight tower, which is 47 1/2 feet up. (To go the full distance, it’s 145 feet to the top of the skylight.)

And Botta’s handling of materials in the lobby is surprisingly gauche. Stripes are a Botta trademark, but here they’re enough to kill you: alternating bands of polished and flame-finished black granite on the floor, ground-level walls, stair and column bases; and bands of natural and black-stained wood on the reception desks and coat-check desk. When one material meets another--as in the juncture of black base and white shaft in the columns or that of the lobby’s birch panels and granite walls--the result is not so much connection as collision.

Botta routinely points to three mentors--Carlo Scarpa, Le Corbusier and Louis I. Kahn--who were masters of a brand of modernism that combined the heroic with the humanistic.

While Botta’s suave handling of the gallery skylights in SFMOMA does bring to mind Kahn’s sublime Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth, the rest of the building lacks Kahn’s breathtaking poetry of understatement, typified by the Kimbell and by Kahn’s British Art Center at Yale, with its anonymous, warehouse-like exterior and its severely elegant concrete-and-oak interior.

Nor does Botta have Scarpa’s sybaritic touch with materials and details, epitomized in the latter’s Castelvecchio Museum in Verona, Italy. And none of these architects ever made the mistake that Botta makes at SFMOMA, which is to confuse style with substance. Just because a building looks monumental doesn’t make it a monument.

But that, one suspects, is precisely why the museum’s trustees were so unanimous in their choice of Botta. If what they wanted was a signature building by a world-class architect, then they got nothing less. But, at least on the outside, they got nothing more, either.

San Francisco has a tradition of brick buildings; they just aren’t as gracelessly proportioned as this one. (One observer likened the museum’s squat form to that of a sumo wrestler.) And while the downtown area has seen more than its share of bad contemporary architecture in the last two decades, Botta might have made some gesture toward his surroundings, as Fumihiko Maki and James Stewart Polshek did so admirably in their Yerba Buena buildings. Botta couldn’t even make the one older architectural gem in the vicinity look good: The graceful Pacific Bell Tower behind the museum appears to be cut off at the knees.

If Botta had taken his cathedral analogy seriously, he would have recalled that the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe were not signature buildings. Even St. Peter’s in Rome, with its cast of superstar architects that included Michelangelo, Bramante and Bernini, was an ensemble piece. If SFMOMA’s exterior were as disciplined and ego-free as its galleries, San Francisco would really have something to brag about.

* San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 3rd St. Three exhibitions inaugurate the museum, which opens to the public on Wednesday for 11 days of special previews: “Public Information: Desire, Disaster, Document” through April 30; “William Klein New York 1954-1955,” through April 19, and “Mario Botta: The SFMOMA Project,” through June 15 . (415) 357-4000.

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