New Forms Taschen 092

Mario Borta

San Francisco Museum

of Modem Art

San Francisco, Califomia. 1990-94 In this image. Fumihiko Maki's Yorba Bucna Center is visible in the foreground, and one of the towers of the Bay Bridge in the background. With its massive brick veneer volume. Botta s museum does not appear to be directly related to any of the surroundmg architecture. It does, however, confer a sense of the im-portance that both the architect and the museum trustees wished to give to the art they display within its walls.

New American Homes for Culture

The American system has permitted the creation of numerous museums, despite an almost total lack of government support. The direct intervention by central governments favored in Europę, for example, is of course replaced by the fiscal encouragement of donations in the United States. Because of the recession that marked the later part of the 1980s, the creation of new museums in the United States certainly slowed, although the West and Southwest continued to feel a need to develop their cultural resources morę than the developed East.

One of the most ambitious museum projects in the United States to be com-pleted in recent years is Mario Botta's San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1990-94). There was no competition as such held for the choice of the architect of this cen-trally located 18,500 m² museum. Rather, the Trustees of the Museum, which was created in 1935, interviewed five architects: Mario Botta, Frank O. Gehry, Thomas Beeby, Tadao Ando, and Charles Moore. Located on Third Street, near the Moscone Convention Center, the museum, which opened on January 18,1995, is part of an urban redevelopment program covering an area of morę than 40 hectares, first envisaged by the city of San Francisco in 1954. It is located across the Street from Fumihiko Maki's new Yerba Buena Center, whose light, ship-like style seems at odds with Botta's brick veneer cladding, and massive, almost windowless design. A central oculus, which appears on the exterior of the building in the form of a truncated cylinder, brings light to the five stories of the building, and particularly to the generous, 7 m high top-lit galleries on the upper floor. Built on city land put at the disposition of SFMoMA by the redevelopment agency responsible for the Yerba Buena district, the new structure was built at a cost of $60 million, provided almost entirely by private donations.