A gift, wrapped

ONE of the reasons this city has been inhospitable to ambitious architecture in the decades since World War II -- and it has been unusually so -- is its inclusive-to-a-fault civic process, which often appears to value pique more highly than any other emotion. A single aggrieved neighbor, bicyclist or all-purpose naysayer is sometimes all that’s required to bring a large-scale project to a halt.

And when the neighbor, bicyclist and naysayer find themselves unified against a proposed building -- as was the case with the new De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, designed by the perennially inventive Swiss firm Herzog & De Meuron -- its chances of getting off the ground are usually close to nonexistent.

So there is much evident relief among De Young officials and fans of contemporary architecture this week as the $202-million, 293,000-square-foot museum readies for its opening Saturday. The building project has its roots in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which revealed severe structural problems in the old De Young, a collection of red-tile-roofed buildings. It has survived two failed bond measures, two lawsuits by a citizens group concerned about the new museum’s effect on the park and more than a hundred contentious public meetings.

The building, in the end paid for almost entirely with private money, reflects the architects’ ruthless curiosity about the role of architecture in defining contemporary cities and their taste for unorthodox cladding materials -- in this case, an exterior of copper panels that are dimpled in some spots and perforated, with circular holes, in others. The design, executed locally by the firm Fong & Chan, represents an architectural milestone for San Francisco. It ranks as the most important cultural building to open in the Bay Area since Kevin Roche’s 1969 Oakland Museum of California.

At the same time, the design is never able to shake completely free of the political fights that have dogged it from the beginning, at least in the sense that its architecture is more calculated, constricted and protective than expressly creative. This is true both on the exterior, with its hard armor of copper, and in the courtyards and galleries, where the running theme is space that is narrowed to the point of claustrophobia, then generously widened, then cinched again. The 144-foot tower that rises from the back of the building -- the design’s only vertical element and home to the museum’s education department -- torques sharply as it moves higher, suggesting a body trying hard to wriggle away from something or someone.

A psychoanalyst, in other words, could have a field day with this design.

The building seems particularly severe given Herzog & De Meuron’s turn, in recent and upcoming projects, toward a rich, playful Expressionism. In its extension to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which opened in April but was designed largely after the De Young, and in forthcoming buildings such as the Olympic Stadium for the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, Herzog & De Meuron has displayed a new interest in curvilinear forms and carefully controlled but highly effective blasts of decoration. The architects’ Prada store in Tokyo, finished in 2003, is a gem-like marvel covered with diamond-shaped windows.

Together, those projects represent a new direction for Herzog & De Meuron, a move away from the rectangular boxes, draped in eye-catching skins, that made their reputation in the 1990s. They also suggest the growing influence of younger partners Harry Gugger and Christine Binswanger.

The De Young lacks almost entirely that combination of playfulness and fluidity, which has added a welcome layer to the firm’s already densely provocative work. Instead, it’s a last, rather unforgiving vestige of the famous Herzog & De Meuron box.

The box in this case is low-slung and very wide, copper-colored now but soon to turn green as the panels oxidize. (That process, which will take about 15 years, will be accelerated by moisture from the fog that rolls in from the ocean and blankets the park most afternoons.) The architects initially wanted to use redwood for the facade, in a nod to the Bay Area architecture of Bernard Maybeck and others. That would have been a fascinating experiment, but it proved impractical.

The museum sits at a perfectly classical right angle to the nearby Golden Gate Park band shell -- indeed, throughout the design is contextual in posture if not in personality -- and directly across from the site of Renzo Piano’s California Academy of Sciences, a building with a rolling, planted roof that will open in 2008. The architectural dialogue between Piano, now the most sought-after museum architect in the world, and Herzog & De Meuron, which had never designed a museum from the ground up before the De Young, should be fascinating.

In shape, the new museum is not so different from Herzog & De Meuron’s 1998 Dominus Winery in the Napa Valley. What’s new in this case are the pockets of irregularly shaped space that slice and punch through the box, bringing natural light into unexpected corners. Landscaping by Oakland-based rising star Walter Hood is carried through sections of the interior in two double-height gardens faced in curving glass, one filled mostly with eucalyptus and the other with ferns.

The museum is organized around two central voids. One is a courtyard, paved in Yorkshire limestone, that acts as an elongated, outdoor entry hall for the museum: It leads visitors from a rectangular opening in its facade, where you expect the entrance to be, to the actual front doors. It holds a site-specific installation by Andy Goldsworthy that includes boulders (of the same limestone) that act as benches. Goldsworthy has cracked each boulder, opening up fissures meant to suggest seismic fault lines. The walls of the courtyard come together in unusually tight angles.

The other void is a double-height interior lobby, officially called the Wilsey Court, where a broad ceremonial stair faces off against a gigantic photo-mural, called “Strontium,” by the German artist Gerhard Richter. With its tall white walls and its second-floor windows, which offer views down into the central space, the court suggests a smaller version of the huge atrium in Yoshio Taniguchi’s new Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Wilsey Court is also surprisingly cold architecturally, especially given that it represents the heart of the museum, the place where all of its wandering axes cross. Perhaps seeing it filled with people, after the museum opens to the public this weekend, will change that impression. But the disappointing Richter, which was commissioned for the wall where it hangs, lends the room only a faint, fuzzy energy, and the stair itself matches the prosaic quality of the room as a whole.

A more compelling feature is the double stair that leads from the court down to the temporary exhibition hall, which is unceremoniously tucked away below ground. This stair, which hugs the curving glass wall of one of Hood’s interloping gardens, is among the museum’s chief pleasures, perhaps because the architects seem to downplay it so much.

The galleries on the main floor, which contain 20th century American art as well as an excellent collection of Maya pieces, are generally traditional if rather blocky white-cube spaces, with floors of Italian porphyry stone. The best of these are the double-height rooms lined with postwar American art, a part of the collection the De Young has worked hard to beef up in the last decade.

It’s only on the upper level that the architects make an effort to loosen up: Though the rooms for 18th and 19th century American paintings up here are muted and traditional, the galleries for African and Oceanic art are practically riotous compared with ones directly below. They have oversized glass cases lined in Sydney blue, a kind of eucalyptus, to go with floors and ceilings covered in the same wood.

Some of the cases hide structural columns, freeing up the rest of the gallery space. More important, they help bring the architecture fully to life. With side walls that cant in and out, and a sloping ceiling, these galleries make up a wood-paneled funhouse that still manages to pay careful attention to the objects on view, many of which are spectacularly displayed and lighted.

Despite the strong personality of those galleries, they are marked by occasionally noticeable architectural effort (a cousin of the calculation evident elsewhere), particularly on this willfully unusual top floor. By contrast, the most successful rooms in the museum, though they were surely carefully arranged, feel serendipitous. An example is the space leading to the education tower, where delicate hanging sculptures by Ruth Asawa, made of wire, cast beautiful shadows on the concrete walls -- the new building’s happiest marriage of art and architecture.

To experience the best part of the new museum, you have to head outside and position yourself under the cantilevered roof that hangs dramatically over the western edge of the building. It’s here, in the air above outdoor seating for the cafe and a sculpture garden, that the design’s combination of blunt power and rough materials really begins to take off: Something about the size of those huge roof panels and their texture, along with the way they filter the afternoon light, is powerful enough to stop you in your tracks.

This assured manipulation of light and scale, combined with unorthodox but somehow fitting materials, is what gives Herzog & De Meuron’s most effective buildings their memorable -- and almost physical -- charge. This is an especially important feature for contemporary museums, which have become, in a digital age, shrines to the power of physical objects, a category that in the last decade has come to include not just the art on the walls but the walls themselves.

Indeed, Jacques Herzog has said that museum design “should stress that moment of the real encounter,” calling it “the only true asset left for architecture.”

At the new De Young, that sense of encounter is present only in tantalizing flashes.