Snøhetta, the Viking architects of the World Trade Center pavilion and one of our 2011 Most Innovative Companies, unveiled embryonic plans for a hotly anticipated extension to SFMOMA last week and, as these things go, reactions were mixed. “SFMOMA wing gently expands reach...” a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle cooed. Two days later the same writer, John King, proclaimed the design “imaginative and utterly unexpected, provocative and urbane.” But the L.A. Times’s Christopher Hawthorne condemned the scheme. It’s a “chiseled behemoth” masquerading as something smaller, he wrote, “like an iceberg trying to convince everybody that it is in fact an ice cube.”
Ouch.Who’s right? Both, actually. At 225,000 square feet, the new wing is, virtually by definition, a behemoth, a mass of galleries and other programming that’ll double SFMOMA’s size -- making it nearly as big as New York MoMA -- to accommodate the bluechip art collection that Gap cofounder Donald Fisher bequeathed to the museum just before his unexpected death in 2009. And yet, as we discovered when we caught up with lead architect Simon Ewings recently, the design appears exquisitely considered. At its most rudimentary, it’s an asymmetrical wedge, 195 feet tall and 335 feet wide, conceived of to do what all good architecture does: make life better for people both inside the building and out. This, despite that it rises in what might be the world’s most awkward urban-infill site, behind what might be the world’s most awkward-looking modern-art museum, in a city with an all-too awkward relationship to modern architecture.
Some background: Snøhetta won the commission in July, beating out an all-star cast of architects, including Normal Foster, Renzo Piano, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro. The job: to build a wing in the horribly cramped backyard of SFMOMA’s existing building, a Mario Botta-designed cocoon variously described as iconic and hideous (we tend to think it looks like a giant worm in a Barcalounger), on a lifeless block in San Francisco’s South of Market district. Immediately, Snøhetta set about “trying to get as much information as possible from the stakeholders,” Ewings says. “We spent the first four or five months programming the building, holding workshops with staff and trustees, trying to find out exactly what they wanted so we could build the right building for the client.”