Even with the economic recovery limping along, American museums keep planning, raising piles of money for and opening new wings. An architecture critic — at least one with a high tolerance for the work of Renzo Piano — could conceivably keep busy writing about these projects and nothing else.
There's the Whitney Museum's recent agreement to lease its 1966 Marcel Breuer-designed building to the Metropolitan Museum of Art while it erects a massive new home (designed by Piano, naturally) on the far west side of Manhattan. There is the curious decision by the Museum of Modern Art to purchase the American Folk Art Museum, a 2000 jewel box by the architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien that shares a stretch of 53rd Street with MoMA, without doing much to quell rumors that it plans to knock the building down.
Outside of New York, there is the ill-advised move by the Barnes Foundation from its quirky quarters in suburban Merion, Pa., to the center of Philadelphia. In Fort Worth, there is the Kimbell Art Museum's decision to pair its original Louis Kahn masterpiece with a Piano addition. And let's not overlook a recent West Coast hot streak by Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, which is designing a museum for Eli Broad and a new home for the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
All that to-ing and fro-ing, all that fundraising, politicking and Piano-ing, all those high-ceilinged rooms for all those Richard Serra sculptures and crumpled Cai Guo-Qiang automobiles, and I still haven't mentioned the biggest museum-architecture news of the week: The unveiling Thursday of preliminary plans for a new wing at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Designed by the talented, busy Norwegian firm Snøhetta, which is also at work on the Sept. 11 Memorial Museum at ground zero in New York, the SFMOMA addition will slip a cruise-ship-size building — 335 feet long and nearly 200 feet tall — behind the museum's existing home, which is the work of Swiss architect Mario Botta and opened in 1995.
The proposal is a work in progress. (Snøhetta's Craig Dykers called Thursday's cocktail-hour press event "a preview of a preview.") A full schematic design isn't due until the fall, and so far we've seen very few details of how the galleries — or any of the interior spaces, really — will work.