Ross Harley
Santa Monica, 21 March 1995

San Francisco MOMA

Another impressive contribution to twentieth-century architecture was
unveiled recently in California, with just one small hitch. No one could
tell whether the complex is for shopping or for art.

San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art has unveiled its new
headquarters in a spectacular 225,000-square-foot building located in
the heart of the city’s burgeoning downtown district. The grand launch
in mid January (60 years after the Museum originally opened)
attracted huge crowds from around the world to see the latest of the
new art meccas firsthand. Hardly disappointed by what they
encountered, the insatiable art public continues to flock to the huge
exhibition space, auditorium, cafe and bookstore, giving some cause
to wonder whether there remains any difference between art
consumerism.

Designed by the well-known Swiss architect Mario Botta (his only
museum and first major US commission), the classically modern brick
and granite museum nevertheless has critics divided over its cultural
worth. As with Japanese architect Arata Isozaki’s early 1990’s design
for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, unkind east
coasters in particular are wondering whether it is anything more than
a blatant attempt to buy a little high culture credibility. Isn’t it just a
shopping mall gone all arty. Or vice versa, right?

Wrong. In fact, the new museum gives the New York art emporia
more than a run for their money.

Of course people in the artworld — both sides of the US — remain a
tad sceptical about the financial footing of contemporary art, after the
excesses of the eighties and all. But that hasn’t stopped museums
from becoming the most powerful, most highly visible public
institutions of the present. (Hence the importance of Architecture.)
Much to everybody’s surprise, the SFMOMA Board managed to raise
over $90 million for their New Museum Campaign. Something of a
national record, $65 million of that came from a small handful of
Board Trustees and friends (while, most notably, corporate
sponsorship from the likes of Ford and AT&T barely made the $1
million mark.)

Let’s not be too dramatic though. Fact is, many who feel they live in
the heart of culture in Manhattan have barely noticed the new
museum. Those who have, rather condescendingly suggest that
perhaps the Art-Deco-looking complex might do better were it to look
even more like a department store. New York Times architecture
critic Herbert Muschamp jibed that the $62 million building “should
delight those who lament the passing of the great shopping
emporiums”, adding that he wished museum officials “would have the
wit to inscribe the museum’s name outside in gold Lord & Taylorish
script.” They haven’t.

Not to be put off by such remarks, local Pulitzer Prize-winning
architecture critic Allan Temko went on record in the San Francisco
Focus. He called SFMOMA “one of the best museum buildings of our
time.” Not only that, its “great upslanting skylight … is larger than the
western rose window of Notre Dame in Paris”. Now that’s something
NY MOMA could never claim.

Such facts appear to count a lot in the museum game. According to
the press release at least, the new space is “the second largest single
structure in the US devoted to modern art”, “doubling the museum’s
gallery space” for the 10,000 people expected to visit the museum
each day. Very impressive.

It all sounds over the top. That’s because it really is. The museum
actually fulfils its promise to be the new symbolic monument to
culture in the west. Until the new Getty Museum complex opens in
Los Angeles that is.

Botta has gone so far as to liken his structure to a church, saying that
“the museum’s role in today’s city is analogous to that of the cathedral
of yesterday”. Consequently most visitors have the decidedly
postmodern feeling that their gods are indeed everywhere apparent.
Culture is religion, religion is shopping, shopping is culture, culture
is…

All exaggeration aside, the Museum is indeed one of the finest I have
ever seen. It effortlessly combines the seemingly contradictory
principles of Commerce and Spirit under one roof. Without resorting
to pastiche or architectural quotation, the building suggests to the
visitor that they have entered an extraordinary space in which they
might encounter the most challenging and sublime that our late-
twentieth century commercial culture has to offer. The array of work
on display for the opening exhibitions (from Jeff Koons to Matisse)
only confirms this intuition.

Unlike a good many museums designed by name architects, Botta’s
SFMOMA is an extraordinary space for exhibiting the art of this
century. It does not suffer the fate of merely being an extraordinary
non-utilitarian work of art.

It is difficult not to compare Botta’s spectacularly artful atrium to Frank
Lloyd Wright’s museum masterwork in New York — the Guggenheim.
Both buildings squeeze the visitor through tiny street entrances into
enormous expanses of light and space. Botta’s atrium runs the
building’s full five stories, tunnelling great shafts of light down its
central turret. Likened by the architect to an Italian piazza, the atrium
serves as a spectacular entrance to four floors of exhibition space.
While critics may compare the black and grey striped granite floors
and walls to department store perfume counters, it is the perfect
entrance for an art museum. While Wright contrived to exhibit works
around his spiralling foyer (giving curators headaches to this day),
Botta chose to build his galleries off to three sides of the lobby.

This approach offers rewards at every turn. Generous rooms are
linked by playful stairways. Intriguing vistas across the atrium into
adjacent galleries are provided by unexpected cut-aways. Tiny slit
windows offer tantalising glimpses of the city outside.

Light from the enormous central skylight plays sculptor to the
building’s interior surfaces and volumes. The complex arrangement
of diffusers and curved translucent paneling in the galleries (which
took more than three years to develop) provides excellent lighting for
the works of art. From the incredible 25 foot ceilings of the
contemporary gallery on the fifth floor to the endless corridors of
panels in the third floor galleries (which house the permanent
collection), the visitor is rewarded continually with architecturally
exciting spaces. Best of all, the work on display never plays second
fiddle to the architect’s ego.

The fifth floor also sports a virtually transparent metal ramp that spans
the thirty-eight foot diameter turret. Though this bridge provides no
practical access that couldn’t have been given more easily from the
circumference, it’s a spectacularly dramatic viewing platform. Here —
seventy-five feet above the ground floor and sixty feet below the
skylight — one feels the vertigo of culture first hand. It is also a great
spot to appreciate the simplicity and elegance of Botta’s minimalist
abstraction: the voluminous cylindrical lobby, the views up to the sky
and out to surrounding buildings, the ziggurat-like turnings of the
central staircase.

Looking from across the road in the newly opened Beuna Yerba
Gardens, Botta’s controversial candy-striped stone work makes best
sense. The two-toned granite and modest brick cladding fuse
classical, modern, and postmodern styles together — especially with
Fumihiko Maki’s recently completed Centre for the Arts complex in the
foreground and Timothy Pflueger’s 1925 Pacific Bell classic
skyscraper looming behind.

From this perspective, Botta’s three-tiered stepped back landmark
looks anything but conservative. Critics might not agree why, but
there is little doubt in anyone’s mind that Botta’s museum has already
become an icon for San Francisco’s cultural aspirations. Which is
more than a shopping mall could ever aspire to, right?