A Swiss Treat for Golden Gate Park

This week the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco unveiled the design for the new M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park, and the result should make more than a few of the country’s art institutions green with envy.

Designed by the Swiss team of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the museum building will replace the original pink Spanish-style structure, which was built in 1919 and was severely damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. It will nearly double the museum’s size to 280,000 square feet, and will include 14,000 square feet in temporary exhibition space as well as galleries for the museum’s broad collections of American, African, pre-Columbian and Native American art. Board members already have raised $80 million of the $135 million needed to complete the project. Construction is scheduled to begin at the end of 2001, for completion in 2005.

But it is the design that will stun those who doubt whether great architecture and art can coexist. Herzog and De Meuron conceived the project as an extension of the park’s landscape. The building is organized as three parallel bars, like fingers extending out into the surrounding gardens, allowing the landscape to flow into the structure in a series of outdoor spaces and interior courts. By breaking the structure apart into discrete elements, the architects avoid the typical narrative structure of a traditional museum, where visitors follow a series of rooms arranged in historical order. Instead, the various art forms represented in the museum’s collections will each carry equal weight, and the galleries’ forms will be as eclectic as the art they house.

The new De Young will stand on the site of the original museum, on axis with the California Academy of Science and alongside the park’s much-loved Japanese Tea Garden. In order to break down the notion of a central narrative, there will be no main entry. Visitors will enter from one of three points at opposite ends of the building and flow toward a triangular-shaped central court. From here, visitors can enter each of the various galleries, which function as semi-independent museums. Large diamond-shaped courtyards pierce the structure’s main level, drawing the landscape directly into the building.

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Painting Galleries Will Be Conventional

The galleries are divided into three loosely defined types. Perhaps sensitive to the well-worn criticism by some that contemporary architects’ penchant for odd-shaped forms is not conducive to viewing traditional art, many of the painting galleries will be relatively conventional: rectangular rooms with skylights and the occasional window. Sculptural objects will be displayed along what the architects describe as a “meandering walk” through more free-flowing galleries. Intimate works will be housed in smaller pavilions.

But it is these architects’ subtle understanding of their materials that will enliven these interior rooms. The galleries that occupy the tips of the building’s “fingers,” for instance, will be used to house objects least sensitive to light so that views can be opened up to the exterior gardens. Mirrors will reflect the natural landscape deep into the interior of the museum, while other galleries will be clad in stone or wood. The result will be varying degrees of transparency, dissolving boundaries between inside and out and offering a variety of unexpected contexts to the weary museum goer.

These elements all will be collected under an enormous, cantilevered roof. The roof both gives the design a sense of unity and visually connects the building to the surrounding park. Its low, horizontal form--decorated with flowing rooftop landscaping and skylights and carved open to reveal the courtyards below--anchors the building to its context.

The effect is reminiscent of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s New National Gallery in Berlin; built in 1968, it is a masterpiece of Modern architecture. But where Mies’ museum is essentially an elegantly refined glass box, its symmetrical steel roof an emblem of classical order, Herzog and De Meuron’s design creates a tension between the unifying symbolism of the roof structure and the more fractured interior of the museum. Here, the desire for openness and freedom and the longing for cohesive meaning are presented as competing themes.

The museum’s only vertical element is the education tower, which rises 160 feet at the structure’s northeast corner. Clad entirely in glass, the tower will twist dramatically as it rises in order to align with the city’s grid, visually connecting the building to its larger urban context. The tower will house a library, cafe and observation deck.

Since winning the competition to design London’s new Tate Museum of Modern Art in 1994, Herzog and De Meuron have become the darlings of the art world. The Tate annex design, which will transform London’s former Bankside Power Station into one of the world’s biggest museums of Modern art, has garnered the firm endless attention and commissions. They recently won a competition to design the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas in Austin, and in 1998 they were among three finalists in a competition to design the expansion of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

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Design Gives Building Natural Breathing Space

Elements of these other designs resurface here. The form of the De Young’s education tower, for instance, seems plucked right out of the firm’s earlier design for MOMA. And the De Young’s massive roof, which serves to visually unite the more free-flowing elements below, resembles the roof the team designed for a private residence and video gallery in nearby Napa Valley.

But rarely have they achieved such an elegant and original composition as the one for San Francisco. In their design for MOMA, which stands on a dense, urban site, galleries were more straightforward, even slightly cramped. The design lacked a clear sense of order. This time, the landscape gives the building room to breathe. Whether or not the completed structure will be great architecture is still to be seen. Herzog and De Meuron’s architecture relies on a subtle understanding of material. In their best designs, glass, stone and wood take on an almost metaphysical meaning, and those details have yet to be worked out. There is little doubt, however, that Herzog and De Meuron are on the right track.