Although some say the new de Young Museum in San Francisco resembles a washed-up aircraft carrier, it also looks a lot like the golden hills of California. The roofline traces a gentle curve, and the facade's dimpled copper cladding changes character depending on the light and fog coming off San Francisco Bay. And that's just part of the thrill of this amazing new building designed by the Swiss firm of Herzog & de Meuron: Above all, it shows how eye-popping architecture can still be profoundly suited to both its location and its purpose.
The opening of the de Young earlier this year came as a bit of a relief in the museum world. Ever since Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim opened in 1997, new museum buildings have tended to become more about their architects than their art -- think of Zaha Hadid's Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati or Santiago Calatrava's Milwaukee Art Museum.
Each blockbuster opening prompts fears, sometimes realized, of white elephants -- expensive museums so fantastic they're unsuited to showing art, or so restrained they're just boring. But the new de Young, which cost nearly $200 million, manages to match an unusual sense of rigor with plenty of snap. From soup to nuts -- from the landscaping of its driveway to the floors of its support spaces -- the dramatic building seeks to serve its art, its public, and its purpose.
MAX HEAD ROOM. The de Young, whose previous building was damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, seized this ground-up construction as an opportunity to fine-tune its "back of house," with the goals of taking the best possible care of the art, minimizing the costs of visiting exhibitions, and making the museum a destination for scholars.
While most museums devote four times as much space to support services (offices, education, conservation) as they do to the galleries, the new building's efficient design allows the de Young to devote only three times as much, without sacrificing operations. This is partly due to the sharing of some functions with its sister museum in San Francisco, The Legion of Honor, but it's also a result of careful planning of the new building's layout.
For example, it has a dedicated "art corridor" that leads directly from a fully secure loading dock to temporary exhibition galleries on the same level. Visiting artworks can be processed and prepared for showing without being jostled into an elevator or crossing paths with bookstore deliveries. The direct access it provides is an added selling point for the museum as it negotiates loans, and the corridor is large enough to accommodate the biggest of them -- like the giant Olmec head from Mexico on view through next year. It's the kind of feature often forgotten amid the bombast of contemporary architecture, but one that's crucial to a museum's smooth functioning.
A BIG BATH. Similarly, the de Young's conservation studios are designed to be showpieces, even though only a few people will seem them. Art and sculpture conservators work like artists in high-ceilinged, north-facing rooms, which ensure the appropriate light. Filled with both ventilation hoods and easels, the rooms look like a cross between science labs and artists studios -- which, in a way, they are.
The textiles-conservation room is even designed so that it can be flooded, becoming a room-size bath for the largest tapestries -- an innovation developed by Herzog & de Meuron's local architects on the project, San Francisco-based Fong & Chan, which drew on its experience designing laboratories for universities and pharmaceutical companies.
But the museum has been designed as much with museumgoers in mind. Approaching the de Young through Golden Gate Park, there's no long flight of stairs to climb or formal procession to walk in order to enter the building. Instead, a handful of smaller entrances allow visitors to go in one end of the building and exit the other without having to buy a ticket for the galleries -- as if the museum were just an extension of the park. Landscape architect Walter Hood's design brings a blanket of grass right up to the edge of the building's copper facade, helping to visually incorporate the building and its surroundings.
A CLEAR MESSAGE. In an age when new museums can seem like vanity projects for their trustees, the de Young proclaims itself as a landmark for the people. The twisting tower that rises dramatically above one corner of the building is fortress-like and imposing, yet inside are seminar rooms and libraries open to the public. The spectacular view from the top of the tower isn't given over to a trustee's dining room, but to an observation deck.
The museum and its architects are sending a crucial message here: Rather than the architecture proclaiming the museum's elitism, it raises its most public functions to the most celebrated spot in the building. At the de Young, the architecture serves the art and the people.
Blum is a contributing editor to BusinessWeek Online in New York
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