Some of us thought the day when SFMOMA would complete its much-anticipated expansion project and reopen to the public would never come, but after a three-year modern art version of perpetual winter, the $305 million Snohetta-designed museum finally threw open its doors on May 14 to sell-out crowds.
With a total of 460,000 square feet - 235,000 more than the existing 1995 Mario Botta-designed building - three times the exhibition space and a 10-story addition whose floors are linked by sand-toned stairwells, the transformed SFMOMA is definitely bigger, better in some ways, and in others not. So far, responses to the new edifice, which has entrances on Howard and Third Streets, have ranged from tepid to damning with faint praise along the lines of "it may not be the Taj Mahal or Louis Kahn's Kimbell Art Museum, but it's not without its charms." The Howard Street entrance certainly doesn't announce itself as the site of a major modern art destination, and you'd be forgiven for mistaking it for Bloomingdales a couple of blocks away.
So why couldn't we have had an adventurous architectural statement, a dramatic showplace? No Renzo Piano, Frank Gehry, or Zaha Hadid wonderments for us. Granted, it's hard to do cutting-edge, unconventional architectural design in this process-oriented town that blunts most anything that smacks of the radical or visionary. That said, the new SFMOMA has many virtues to recommend it, such as the large angled windows, some with seating, that allow for rest and reflection, acres of glass, and a half-dozen outdoor sculpture terraces, including one with a green "living wall," and others that afford striking urban views and a ringside seat to this booming city.
Pebbled, off-white, fiberglass-reinforced polymer panels covering the east and west facings seem to undulate, making the sandwiched-in addition that rises above the original red-brick structure look like a mammoth ocean liner or a supersized hunk of meringue. The interior is tasteful and restrained to the point of blandness - the only place you're likely to see more blonde wood in a single place is an Ikea outlet. That Scandinavian reserve (Snohetta is a Norwegian-based firm) is relieved only by the blast of blood-red elevator doors framed in black; they reminded me of "The Shining," and I mean that as a compliment. Kudos, too, to the audacious wayward soul who came up with the color schemes for the restrooms; after I got over the initial shock of one painted in strawberry crush, there was another with contrasting indigo doors and purple everything else.
The galleries are spacious, understated showcases that offer the works in them room to breathe, and visitors expansive, comfortable viewing, at least until they have to figure out which end of the floor they're on. Both entries are problematic. The street-level entrance on Howard, a glass-enclosed space occupied in toto by Richard Serra's massive sculpture "Sequence," begs the question: Is this a solo piece of monumental public art in a civic-minded office building, or the gateway to an art institution? (One must climb a nearby stairway to gain access to a new second-floor ticketing area.) As you wend your way through the inside of Serra's irregular circular maze of rusted steel, the enormous curved panels seem to lean toward you, and it's unclear where the journey begins and ends. The experience is a prelude, not a deliberate one I'm certain, to the sense of disorientation and lack of flow that plague the building.
An essential tenet of good design is that we know instinctively where we are as we move through a space, impelled from one area to another without a compass. But it's easy to lose one's bearings and get turned around here, not just because it's a new place, but because the layout doesn't have an organic logic or a true center of gravity. It wouldn't be the first project attempting to integrate a new wing that was afflicted with such a problem. A metaphor for the challenge that faced Snohetta is a view of the seismic gap between the old building and the addition seen through a glass panel near the fourth-floor elevator; the separation permits the structures to jostle independently and go their own way in the event of an earthquake. Let's call it an amicable separation without a satisfying reconciliation.
But the real casualty of the makeover is the loss of the once-gracious Third Street lobby, with its black-and-slate-gray atrium and stairwell that fed visitors into a hidden garden of delights that awaited on the floors above. Those supremely elegant design elements have been replaced, in part, with an asymmetrical wood-and-glass "sculptural" staircase that's unmoored, marooned right of center in the room; climbing it is like mounting the deck of the Titanic. Light filters down from Botta's oculus, now essentially a vast skylight painted a bright suburban white; one of the finest architectural features of the old building has been reduced to a sanitized Las Vegas rendering of Mount Vernon.
There's compensation, however, in the revamped Phyllis Wattis Theater, a sleek and snazzy showpiece with black & white op-art slats on the walls, pale grey and creme seats, covert modern lighting and a high-end sound system. It's a stunner, and one can't help wishing its boldness prevailed elsewhere.
Can we learn to love the new SFMOMA? Perhaps with familiarity, the passage of time and a foundation of rewarding experiences, the building will grow on us. After all, it's the art that really counts.