Mario Botta building, 1995 In the summer of 1988, architects
Mario Botta, Thomas Beeby and
Frank Gehry were announced as finalists in a competition to design the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's new structure in Downtown. Semifinalists included
Charles Moore and
Tadao Ando. The three finalists were to present site-specific design proposals later that year, but the museum canceled its architectural competition after only a month and went with the 45-year-old Botta. The new museum, planned in association with architects
Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum, was built on a parking lot on Third Street between Mission and Howard streets. The South-of-Market site, near
Moscone Convention Center, was targeted through an agreement between the museum, the redevelopment agency, and the development firm of
Olympia & York. Land was provided by the agency and developer, but the rest of the museum was privately funded. Construction of the five-story building began in early 1992, with an opening in 1995, the institution's 60th anniversary. At the time of the new building's opening, SFMOMA touted itself as the largest new American art museum of the decade and, with its of exhibition space, the second-largest single structure in the United States devoted to modern art. (New York's
Museum of Modern Art, with of gallery space, was then the largest single structure, while the nearly 80,000 combined square feet of Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles put it in second place).
Michael Kimmelman in
The New York Times reported that the new Botta buildingconsists of galleries rising around a central, skylighted atrium. The overall structure, roughly speaking, is a series of stepped-back blocks with a cylinder in the middle containing the soaring light well and stairway...Outside, rising above the nearly windowless, striated brick facade, is the giant black-and-white striped silo of the central well, sliced on the bias, topped by a 130-foot-high elliptical skylight that has already become the museum's trademark. Botta's interior design is marked by alternating bands of polished and flame-finished black granite on the floor, ground-level walls, and column bases, and by bands of natural and black-stained wood on the reception desks and coat-check desk.
Snøhetta expansion, 2016 In 2009, in response to significant growth in the museum's audiences and collections since the opening of the 1995 building, SFMOMA announced plans to expand. A shortlist released in May 2010 included four architecture firms officially under consideration for the project:
Adjaye Associates;
Diller Scofidio + Renfro;
Foster + Partners; and Norwegian architecture firm
Snøhetta. In July 2010 the museum selected Snøhetta to design the expansion. On May 14, 2016, following a three-year-long closure, the museum re-opened to the public. The approximately expansion joined the existing building with a new addition spanning from Minna to Howard Streets. The expanded building includes seven levels dedicated to art and public programming, and three floors housing enhanced support space for the museum's operations. It offers approximately of indoor and outdoor gallery space, as well as nearly of art-filled free-access public space, more than doubling SFMOMA's previous capacity for the presentation of art and providing almost six times as much public space as the pre-expansion building. The soaring "silo" with its Oculus Bridge remained, but the Botta staircase was removed. The expanded building includes a large-scale vertical garden on the third floor, purported to be the biggest public
living wall of native plants in San Francisco; the large, free-access Roberts Family Gallery on the ground-floor gallery facing
Howard Street, with glass walls that place art on view to passersby; a double-height "white box" space on the fourth floor with sophisticated lighting and sound systems; state-of-the-art conservation studios on the seventh and eighth floors; and, on the seventh floor, a long balcony that offers skyline views to the east, toward
Salesforce Tower and the
Bay Bridge. The expansion facades are clad with lightweight panels made of
Fibre-Reinforced Plastic; upon completion, this was the largest application of composites technology to architecture in the United States at the time. The building achieved
LEED Gold certification, with 15% energy-cost reduction, 30% water-use reduction, and 20% reduction in wastewater generation. ==Board of Trustees and Directors==