The Swiss studio has designed the new home for the museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park damaged by the 1989 earthquake. Text by Deyan Sudjic. Photography by Paolo Rosselli. Edited by Rita Capezzuto.
 
San Francisco is not the easiest of places in which to be an architect. Conspicuously beautiful cities seldom are. It has its extraordinary setting, the unforgettable topography overlaid with two urban grids that fail to engage with each other. It has its distinctive architectural vernacular and its sea views as well as a climate that produces the city’s characteristic fog and its billowing silver light. These are the things that bring the wealthy and successful to the city, who do all they can to ensure that it retains what they regard as the qualities that attracted them to San Francisco in the first place. They become vociferous in their opposition to change of any kind. New buildings are burdened with an assumed sense of obligation to carry the marks of the city. Despite its famous liberalism and a certain cultural sophistication, San Francisco remains acutely sensitive to accusations of provincialism. But unlike many parts of America, San Francisco at least has the openness to the outside world to be aware of it.

These last two characteristics, in particular, may help to explain the city’s meagre contemporary architectural culture. What there is of it tends to have been imported from Europe and not always with the happiest of results. The city’s downtown still bears the scars of an ill-advised attempt to impose an aesthetic vision on its new skyscrapers, and it is difficult to find a convincing voice in its most recent architecture. There is Pier Luigi Nervi’s questionable cathedral and Frank Lloyd Wright’s flawed Marin County Center located on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge; there is SFMOMA, by no means the worst of Mario Botta’s museums, while Gae Aulenti has created an Asian art museum out of a classical husk of the city’s former post office; Daniel Libeskind is working on a Jewish museum and as you might expect Renzo Piano is designing a science museum. It is a disparate, incoherent collection of buildings that fails to provide much direction or a lead. And now there is Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron’s de Young Museum.

It is different from the city’s previous architectural imports in that it does indeed offer some more insightful pointers towards a contemporary architectural language. The de Young speaks a language that offers both an architectural intelligence and a tactile physical quality. Set in Golden Gate Park, a lush enclave well away from the city’s downtown, the original de Young was the product of the particular American cultural philanthropy at the end of the 19th century. Its collection, which was original assembled by the wealthy publisher of the city’s daily paper, was expanded with the addition of an unrelated set of individual collections and accommodated in a florid Beaux Arts structure.

The earthquake of 1989 did sufficient damage to persuade the city that it should demolish the structure and replace it with an entirely new museum. Additionally, there were enough people in the city pressing for a more challenging approach to new architecture for the museum to conduct a thorough search. They went to Basel to see Renzo Piano’s Beyeler Gallery, but came back enchanted by Herzog & de Meuron’s railway signal box and were determined to bring them to California.

At that point the Swiss firm had yet to complete any major buildings, still less an art museum, but they succeeded in persuading the de Young that they were ready to provide the energy and the imagination to make a truly contemporary reinterpretation of the museum form. It was at this point that the plans for the new de Young became the flashpoint between two antithetical views of what San Francisco should be. On the one hand, there was the group that did everything possible to stop the project from going ahead with attacks on what they portrayed as the radical nature of Herzog & de Meuron’s design. They fought two successful campaigns to vote down the city taxpayers’ approval of the issuing of the public bonds necessary to finance the project; on the other hand, there were the city’s passionate enthusiasts for the project, in particular the group of wealthy residents who raised more than $180 million in donations to pay for the project when it became all too obvious that there was never going to be a chance of securing public money to build it. In the end, the latter camp won out, managing to beat back all opposition and to realise the design without being forced into any unwelcome compromises.

The completed building marks important new ground for both San Francisco and Herzog & de Meuron. It is the most significant new piece of architecture in the city in at least a generation, one which its enthusiasts passionately hope will prove to be the trigger for an important change in attitudes to architecture in the city. It is a demonstration that an architecture that does not follow the threadbare, worn out logic of contextualism or accessibility can in fact produce work of powerful and rare beauty. It is an assertion of architectural intelligence in the face of received wisdom and the constant restatement of the obvious and the commonplace. According to de Meuron, the gradual evolution of the design into the building’s final form began with a conception of the museum as a number of distinctly linked pavilions, each reflecting an element of the disparate collections that make up the museum. That initial diagram became increasingly condensed as the design process moved forward. The elements of the programme were transformed under pressure, like ancient palm trees transformed into coal strata by geological forces, and they still show signs of what they once were, even in their hardened form. As built, the pattern of scattered pavilions has been pushed and pressured into a tighter, denser configuration. The spaces between pavilions are now internal courtyards and atria linked by dynamic pathways that sweep through the complex. They squeeze together to create open gardens like pockets of trapped air between them, filled with landscaped foliage and revealed within the museum like vitrines full of vegetation.

This organic reading of the museum architecture is confirmed by its skin, a tailored overcoat of patinated copper that is perforated, dimpled and photographically etched with dots to evoke the quality of dappled sunshine percolating through the foliage. As well as a metaphor, it is also ravishingly beautiful. Arrive at sunset and watch the copper caught by the sun’s last rays, and it begins to dematerialise, going from an apparently solid form to something misty, ambiguous and undefined. Some critics have interpreted the new de Young as gathering all the elements of a beaux arts museum - an open courtyard, a tower, a grand staircase, a portico - and reassembling them in a new configuration.

But that traditional museum form also implied putting the main galleries on a top lit piano nobile and using the lower floors for storage and offices. Herzog & de Meuron have done more than deconstruct its elements, they have created a new relationship between them, one that reflects the realities of movement in a car-borne California, allowing visitors to park and move directly into the museum without having to leave the parking structure.

This is a big museum, almost 23,000 m2, with three main floors, one of which is half buried underground. On that level, the museum will stage its temporary exhibits. There is direct access from the underground car park since that is the true front door of a modern museum. Pedestrian access is through the courtyard that penetrates the outer skin on the floor above. Once inside, there is a grandly scaled staircase that takes you up to the third level. The gallery spaces vary in height, some are doubled while others are more modest with an enfiladed arrangement. The most striking new formal element in the mix is the eight-storey high tower at one end of the museum. It accommodates the educational spaces as well as a top floor lookout offering views toward the city, fog permitting. Equally significant, it allows visitors a view of the museum itself, turning it into the largest of its exhibits. If this is hardly a modest gesture, the museum itself is a refreshing alternative to the egotism and exhibitionism of the current crop of museums. It avoids the neurotic search for spectacle, yet still offers an experience that is both powerful and intensely physical, and, more importantly, perceptual. And it might even make life easier for San Francisco’s architects.

Deyan Sudjic is an architecture critic and dean of the Faculty of art, design and architecture at Kingston University London. He has recently published The Edifice Complex. How the Rich and Powerful Shape the World, Penguin, 2005