Enkeboll Designs for the Arts and Architecture

THE ORGANIC QUALITY OF THE

DE YOUNG MUSEUM

by Barbara Lamprecht

Given the press hoopla, it’s not unreasonable to expect to be intimidated by the new de Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. As with any number of recent knockout buildings by starchitects, a visit can feel a little like a scene from that old fable, “The Emperor’s Clothes,” where sycophants of a rotund, preening, and very naked ruler convince themselves, because he says so, that their august leader is garbed in utmost splendor. Does this “emperor” of a building wear clothes? Will the hype undermine our ability to judge for ourselves? And even if we ignore those questions, what criteria do we have to evaluate it as a success?

Opened in December, the de Young has been lauded everywhere as the latest addition to a string of avant-garde buildings (among them the Dominus Winery near Napa) designed by the very hip, very Euro, very serious, Pritzer Prize-winning, Basel, Switzerland-based Herzog and de Meuron. Apart from all the awards and notoriety, one knows they are hip because the founding principals (there are six today) are invariably photographed in black-and-white: no color here, please, early Modernist/Mies/Barcelona Pavilion sensibilities all the way. Frankly appraising faces, a shaved head or tousled hair, black turtlenecks or rumpled (Egyptian?) white cotton, unmade-up face save lipstick for the sole female partner.

One doesn’t begrudge them this brooding affect, though, as it probably tells a truth about their approach, which is indeed serious and thoughtful, as good architecture demands. It maintains the requisite global cachet, and speaks with precision to the kind of clientele the firm wants to work with and scares off the rest. San Francisco-based Fong and Chan, principal architects, realized the complex design, a difficult feat given the scope of concerns they had to resolve. (In their publicity shots, in color, they appear professional but far more congenial.)

Before a first visit, the images of the de Young show a huge, low-slung horizontal slash of dark copper with a slightly ominous, twisted tower at the east end, all set against a backdrop of dense greenery. On the west, a kinked cantilever defines a powerful roof overhang that looks improbably long. The overhang and the tower seem to be delicately balanced on an exaggerated “teeter-totter” of the building’s elongated torso. No wonder one may approach the de Young defensively. Will it be a building one admires in theory but yearns to get away from?

The answer is no, with a couple of caveats. In fact, while the museum does astonish, this building is so compelling that it falls into a special category of architecture: it can be described, as aspects of it are below, but it is best just to go and visit. Rather than feeling like a passive visitor on foreign territory, you may feel, as I did, a curious sensation of some aspect of self that is simultaneously intensified, invited, challenged, and deeply acknowledged without condescension. One can “dwell” here, in the sense of inhabiting a place richly, even if temporarily.

Somewhat to my horror, as I wandered through the building, the word “organic” kept rearing its head. I was dismayed because “organic” is today a misused cliché, co-opted by proponents of curves and opponents of the orthogonal, people who want buildings that look like trees with rocks and boulders at its base to empathize its “earthiness.” In its best sense, however, “organic” is a potentially far more pungent word, meaning, as the 18 th century Italian monk, Carlo Lodoli, coined it and as fin-de-siecle architect and theorist Adolf Loos wrote, something that grows out of and is necessary to function. For American architect Louis Sullivan, “organic” meant expressing life. In that spirit a building “expresses itself,” and manifests its presence in the world. It feels alive with intention and conviction, as Sullivan’s buildings do, which almost writhe with life. In this sense, the de Young is one of the most organic buildings I have ever experienced. Life can be expressed in different ways: sometimes the de Young feels like an intelligent 21 st century machine, technically well executed and far more sophisticated than the early 20 th century paradigm of the “machine-in-the-garden.” Other times it like a kind of large living beast, at rest yet alert; or even, inside on the ground floor, like an open plain punctuated with long, thin gardens scattered about.

There has been a torrent of text on this $202 million building, but I would like to explore two questions. First, I suggest that this building respond to some very primal human environmental needs. That is, if this building feels like a good place to be, why? What does it mean to “trust” a building, as I argue that this building is trustworthy. Second, is its ever-changing copper skin an example of 21 st century ornament? These two questions sound unrelated, but both deal with aspects of environmental psychology, our emotions, our genetic ancestry, and cognitive science.

Transitions

Just as the new building replaces the old de Young complex, 1894-2002, the new museum’s architecture reflects the dramatic changes in a important museum’s attitude to art and a shift in the relationship between a private endeavor and a very public, opinionated, and diverse city.

The old de Young was a eclectic mix of buildings. It included the fantastic Egyptian “Revival” Palace, 1894, a left-over building recycled from a world’s fair. This structure embodied that particular Victorian flair for freewheeling eclecticism, in this case, reproducing parts of what could be Egypt ’s Temple of Luxor , even battering the exterior walls to mimic the sloping pylon walls of Egyptian monuments. Its heavy masonry façade created a ponderous footprint in the park, very much the imprint of a prosperous and inquisitive Victorian society intent on aligning itself with the very roots of European arts and culture.

The 1921 larger addition was a larger, Spanish-style courtyard building, now named the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum after founder Michael H. de Young, publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle. Orthogonal and reminiscent of the sprawling monumentality of the late 17 th century Versailles Palace, its tall tower neatly bisected the symmetry of the composition, whose wings stretched like prongs toward the southeast portion of the park and the rest of the city. Like the smaller Egyptian building, it too insisted on the propriety of the Roman ideal of frontality, and was almost confrontational in its attempt to impress a strong axis in a park intent on resisting it. Golden Gate Park , begun in 1868, was based on Central Park by Frederick Law Olmsted, whose naturalistic landscaping aesthetics were balanced by a fervent belief in the efficacy of parks to be a balm for the inhabitants of the polluted cities of the Industrial Revolution. The park is filled with curving roads in a city notorious for its lack of sustained grids and axes.

Despite all the differences between the building we see today and the old complex of six buildings, the old Spanish complex did have some elements in common with the new de Young in how it tried to respond to nature and to its siting. For one thing, the old de Young anticipated its future site of lush and dense greenery through its tower and its ornament, when the grounds were little more than rolling sand dunes (the same sand under the new building, requiring special engineering to support it, and that is incorporated into the new landscaping.) “The height of the tower was supposed to ‘make it harmonize with the tall trees of its surroundings, as the lower masses of the main wings accord … with the dense copses of the undergrowth,” a 1917 San Francisco Chronicle article promised potential visitors. Perhaps anticipating criticism of this bloody great building in what was supposed to be a pristine park, (a criticism that still stands today of any building in the park), the article continues, “It is to be no obtrusive feature in the landscape, out of place in a park, but almost an atmospheric effect among the trees … to be rather an undertone in the woodland setting,” a sentiment that was overly optimistic for the old building but certainly holds true for the new, even though it has an undeniable presence in the landscape and is unmistakeably and intentionally a piece of human artifice.

Second, the profuse ornament everywhere, especially around openings, on columns and along borders, was not only supposed to serve as allegories of California history but to mimic the vegetation of the park, especially the rhythmic spacing of large finials atop virtually every wall, creating a forest of encrusted ornament. These spiky finials provide a transition between the sky and the horizontal concrete-and-stucco walls by breaking up the walls’ bulk, just as leaves do on the outer edges of a tree, bringing it closer to the scale of both humans and trees. In a similar fashion, the perforated copper skin on the new de Young creates texture and rhythm and a transition in scale not between horizontal planes and the sky, but between the large bulk of the building and the human being.

Third, again in concert with the new de Young, the architectural scheme called for work by other artists, including the surviving Pool of Enchantment by sculptor Earl Cummings. The idea of bringing in other ideas, voices and agendas into the new scheme, like the old, ideally amplifying it and complementing it, enlarges the scope of both the larger work of architecture per se and the social and cultural context of the overall project.

The de Young's signature palm trees, many of which date from the 1895 Mid-Winter Fair, were relocated, returned to the site and replanted after construction finished. Other existing de Young elements, such as the Doré Vase and its signature sphinxes, were placed near the building’s approach on the east.

The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake damaged the buildings beyond repair. They were demolished in 2002.

Leading to the new de Young

The Swiss firm is renowned for how it questions conventional relationships in construction and for its bold use of patterns on what, throughout much of their previous work, were precisely crafted boxes.

There is a veritable “parade of varied colors, patterns, materials, forms and externally visible construction techniques,” as writer Diana Ketchum points out, a parade typically rendered with with Many times Herzog and de Meuron’s facades include panels that vary in their opacity, which means that the perception of the building changes with weather and time of day. Each material, not surprisingly, is calibrated to each project. So there is inexpensive ribbed standard translucent plastic panels in clear and pastel colors at the Laban Dance Centre, 2002, located on a charmingly grotty canal in southeast London .

The tough industrial panels are perfect choices here for the tasks assigned to them: the colors contradict the dullness of weather and cityscape surrounding the centre, but also are a good fit for the gauziness of London air.

They also imbue the building with a light-hearted spirit befitting a dance studio; at night the building glows, announcing itself and its community as a contributing and strengthening strand in the disjointed urban fabric around it. In sharp contrast, the now famous façade of the Dominus Winery, 1997, proposes a different solution to vastly different concerns. The setting and client could not be more different: a private, exclusive client in open field of grapevines set against Northern California hills a stone’s throw from the ocean. Here, a long, low rectangle of a building, uninterrupted except for a few openings for vehicles and walkways, hugs the landscape; like the old de Young, the building creates a strong axis, but here mimics the regular rhythm of the grapevine.

Rock, not prefabricated plastic, is the medium for light, texture and heat for this particular skin. Dappled, broken light comes through dark basalt rock precisely placed (to achieve a regular, if broken, pattern) in an open steel mesh that is typically used for cheap and quickly erected retaining walls in river engineering. The mesh and its contents is attached to the steel and concrete structural frame. Two different sizes of rock, crudely calibrating the amount of light and heat entering the working barn, are located according to what is behind the façade; for example, where wine is being stored or processed, the rocks are smaller so that less light (and therefore heat) penetrates. There is no question that this weaving of stone, this breathing skin suspended in mid-air, is not stone’s normal work of load-bearing and transferring heavy loads into the earth. It is not combined with cement or mortar to form a smooth, opaque wall; instead, the rock is liberated to find a new identity.

Another example of how Herzog de Meuron uses patterns to introduce scale is the façade of the Eberswalde Library in Germany, 1999. The exterior of this taut minimalist box alternates bands of windows and photographic images etched onto concrete and glass. The only apparent theme linking these eclectic group of images – houses, dancing maidens, ants, groups of people -- is that they were chosen by contemporary experimental photographer Thomas Ruff from his private collection, some from old German newspaper clippings. Ruff has said, “Photography can only reproduce the surface of things,” so the idea of “surface” is deeply embedded, so to speak, into the concept of the building itself and in the concerns of the very people involved with the making of it. The effect is something like a Greek frieze multiplied, although here the box is broken down visually with strips of two-dimensional images rather than stone ornament. A final example in this “parade of patterns” is the photo-printed acrylic panels with a repeating botanical image seen at the Ricola-Europa Factory and Storage Facility, 1993, Mulhouse, France. These images were the work of Karl Blossfeldt, 1865-1932, a botanist and photographer in turn-of-the-century Berlin. His entire photographic output is devoted to plant parts: twig ends, seed pods, tendrils, leaf buds, etc., photographed at close range against stark backgrounds. He was deeply interested in forms and textures that nature uses over and over again and was constantly exploring issues of scale.

Blossfeldt’s passion is particularly interesting because the role of scale in so-called “natural” ornament (the landscape around us) is very much a topic of research by environmental psychologists and scientists. Some research has established links between scale in natural ornament (trees with their trunks, branches, limbs, twigs and leaves) and human “preferences,” a term that quantifies our emotional response to scenarios we are exposed to. The research suggests that using a range of scales from large to small – one of ornament’s historical roles, though by no means the only one -- rather than jumping from small to huge with no transition, helps people create a stronger emotional connection to an environment. A lack of transition lurks behind some complaints attached to splashy new “scale-less” contemporary buildings that are more interested in attention than connection to their surroundings, which is aided by an attention to gradations in scale. This issue is especially pertinent with regard to the de Young Museum, a huge building that at first glance looks monolithic and monochromatic.

The new de Young

The new de Young is a departure for the architects in two ways. First, the complex requirements of the museum, intent on both reaching out to the community and engaging the park more emphatically, provided the perfect opportunity to go beyond “the box.” Secondly, the skin of the building is now much more three-dimensional, not a two-dimensional graphic image, which has important consequences in how people perceive the building.

The new 293,000-square-foot building, with twice the floor area of the old museum on virtually the same size footprint, contains the de Young’s rapidly growing collections. And while any museum’s collections defines its character, this is particularly true at the de Young, whose eclectic and wide-ranging holdings make it almost a familiar family member to many in San Francisco. These include indigenous art from diverse geographical areas based in Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, and art from many categories such as textiles, sculpture, graphic arts, decorative arts, fine arts, and periods from ancient to cutting-edge.

Even those sophisticated in art, geography and museums are startled by the collections’ breadth and depth when they visit them for the first time because there is so much new and different here, almost implying that one has inexplicably missed whole genres of art and world culture in their education. In his high school years, a friend of mine, now a Los Angeles architect with two children, would “visit the museum every three or four months with friends, some nerdy art types, some not. The collections were just amazing.” The teenagers made the 140-mile round trip from Davis to San Francisco for all kinds of urban adventure, but the “de Young, with its architecture that was so bad it was forgettable, you had nothing but the art to focus on, was always on the list.”

In part, the Swiss firm had won the commission because, in contrast to other firms for whom the actual galleries in a museum are often an afterthought, it showed a strong interest in how the collections – whose strength, depth and eccentricity is the heart of the museum -- could be shown and how their diversity related with one another.

But what has propelled the firm to fame is the beautiful rendering of the banal, albeit chiselled, box Herzog and de Meuron’s desire to move beyond “the box” with this setting and program meshed perfectly with the desire of museum leaders and curators to reconceive and present the collection differently. “We wanted to emphasize the interconnectedness among cultures and art and people and spaces and the park itself, about what a really magical setting the world is,” said Wendy Norris, the museum’s acting director of marketing. By allowing the design process to be informed by the two critical givens, Golden Gate Park and the collections, the new museum is a controlled composition of spaces.

The new de Young abandons the box in lieu of a more open construct that expresses a much more complicated program, accommodates a wide range of users, and kinetically responds to a fiercelyh cherished site.

Like many Western European and American museums rooted in 19 th century sensibilities, the museum’s take on non-Western arts had been to present it in a clinical setting accompanied by bright, ambient light and lots of representative specimens. Western works of art, in contrast, were often lit with spot lights, in a space specially designated for it, as though underscoring the “heroic genius” in the individuality and preciousness of the work, thus celebrating a unique author (a legacy of 18 th century philosopher Immanuel Kant’s ideas on art, which romanticized the uniqueness of the artist, and of course that meant the Western artist.) The question here was how to show art that is utterly different from Western art, and without condescension, yet speak to its core connections to it. Perhaps that tricky politically-correct dilemma is not really resolved here so much as vigorously confronted. In the new configuration, non-Western art is treated just as individually and as dramatically as Western art can be.

Rethinking “the box” proved to be the key to both engaging the park and the collections. “The old de Young had been a bit of a fortress. There were no windows from the outside reminding you that you were situated within a park setting. So a part of the brief for the architects was to blend this park setting with the institution,” said Norris. In the new building, the box is not so much broken as it is a cardboard carton pulled apart, leaving long diagonal slashes and tears throughout the body of the box to create negative spaces that in turn become opportunities for engagement.

A clue to this paradigm shift happens before the entrance, where one might note what appears to be a crack running toward the building in the pavement. “Ah,” I say, somewhat smug at being so observant, “Too bad. There must have been some sort of settlement in the concrete slab.” It wasn’t until my second visit that I noticed the crack continued on its merry trajectory, even through one of the seven large rocks scattered in front of the long glass wall defining the entrance. This crack and the rock, it turns out, are part of an installation by artist Andy Goldsworthy, who grew up near the Yorkshire stone quarried for the paving surrounding the museum. The crack is a thread, a quirky bread trail, leading us onward; it also reminds us that we are on a delicate fault whose earthquake activity sealed the fate of the earlier de Young and which could wreak havoc again. (Although the base isolation system that separates the building and the earth in the event of an earthquake and the three and one-half foot wide moat to accommodate horizontal displacement, all devised by Fong and Chan, provide superior protection for the new structure.)

By now we have passed under a low-ceilinged space to an enclosed interior angled courtyard with very tall walls, so that one now stands in a copper canyon where one pauses in the open before plunging into art. (This classic, forceful, move of compression-expansion, made most famous by Frank Lloyd Wright, is actually an ancient vernacular architectural strategy seen in Western, Islamic and Asian settings to invoke a new space with an accompanying a new repertoire of behavior, like a kind of architectural palate-cleansing before tasting another space.) Straight ahead are tantalizing and multiple-depth views of people moving within and rays of light pouring into gardens. However, one must move again, this time to the right, to gain entrance. This is no orthogonal procession, ala the old de Young, when entering the belly of this beast.

The negative spaces (the box’s diagonal slashes), turn into positive “fingers” so that landscape and light drive deeply into the museum’s interior. (Just as the entrance into the copper canyon delivers compression/expansion horizontally, or where converging diagonals meet in plan as one traverses the museum, the “fingers” for landscape and light deliver compression/expansion in section, that is, vertically.) In plan, these “fingers,” in turn, also define the boundaries of the huge African, Oceanic and the Americas galleries, which are more spatially liberating than the Western collections. Rectangular galleries would be too alien, too constricting for such art because cubes and rectangles imply allegiance to the auspices of Greek geometries and Pythagorean thinking (although geometry itself, it must not be forgotten, is the abstraction of natural relationships). Though there may not be a way to avoid the architectural conceit of the romance of the primitive, the architecture does try to resist the impositions of Western art conventions and to divest itself of colonialism. Thus, tall, angled walls, “big sky” ceiling heights, the finely detailed wood everywhere, the windows that link us directly to landscaping, either within or without the building, all work together to forge a more overt connection to nature. Even the large, solid display cases in the Oceania Gallery mimic windows and their frames, so that the conventional boundary separating inside from outside is relocated inside the envelope, a gesture that affords a little delicious psychological discomfort, because it also can imply that the viewer herself is being looked at by the genie in the art. These galleries tend to act as big-boned passageways and to encourage pedestrian movement, all eventually leading back to the central courtyard. Openings are often “doubled” along walls, especially near where diagonals cross, so that a visitor can enjoy more of the layering of views the architects set in motion at the entrance: this is a dynamic, kinetic museum, where light and vistas are constantly changing as one moves.

The points where the diagonal “fingers” cross, or “pinch together” as the curators and architects say (that is, where galleries converge) are intended to be powerful moments of frisson because this is where the hierarchies among styles and histories are meant to break down in lieu of universal themes across space and time. “You can look across, say, from African art into contemporary photography, and then the question is, what is the impact on the viewer’s eye if you’re looking at art that is 1,000 years old vs. art that is 60 years old? … and yet we’re looking at similar motifs, or feelings, or connections,” said Norris. In contrast, the rectangular galleries were reserved for American, modern and European art. In the modern and contemporary wing, the spaces are predictable, with white spaces and untrimmed openings between adjacent rooms. Here nature is neither available nor invited. In wings devoted to older American and European art, softly filtered light from above illuminates walls delicately rendered in the colors appropriate to the period of the room’s art. If ever orthogonality was intended as a subtly sarcastic critique of Western mores, this is it. However, Jacques Herzog resists that interpretation. “Using the familiar … was not for the sake of quoting it, nor is it an intellectual joke. We simply use existing and familiar forms and qualities wherever it makes sense, or whenever nothing better is available or nothing better comes to our mind.”

Both the changes in the configurations of the collections and the sudden, but always controlled, views of the park beyond and the more immediate (and masterful) landscaping by Walter Hood, are also sound environmental psychology. They provide mechanisms for way-finding and orienting one’s self, and provide visual breaks for visitors deluged with stimuli, while never abandoning the allure of mystery and adventure, elements that humans also need in their environments. The eye is relieved and refreshed in many subtle ways, so the mind remains attentive.

Another example of how the museum attends to how humans respond to space occurs just beyond the entrance, that is, the grand lobby or piano nobile that is usually part of any big public building. Here the lobby rather brings to mind a different word: savannah.

Savannah is a loaded word in environmental psychology, one connected to a large knowledge base and significant research. Human brains experienced their most dramatic growth on the savannahs of east Africa, large, open areas with groups of trees, big skies, and access to the horizon, all of which enabled us to orient ourselves and act swiftly if necessary . This “collection” of landscape elements served as our evolutionary backdrop for our cognitive development, and we respond positively to places that incorporate similar cues and arrangements. The strategy for the museum’s savannah/lobby resonates with that ancient genetic ancestry. It is not only a large, open place which allows the visitor, especially a first-timer, to orient themselves without much confusion. It also provides opportunities to easily grasp the potential, mystery and variety of ancillary and connecting spaces leading to the collections, staircases, interior gardens, the information/ticket counters, the bookstore, or the café: all places that nurture us in one way or another.

Given so much sensitivity to ergonomics, it is odd that the steps of the major staircase leading to the lowest level, where special exhibitions are housed, were designed with a rise and run (a step’s height and length) that make it impossible to proceed naturally. It is as though the architects were intent on forcing us to break stride, perhaps to disrupt and turn our attention to the primordial, lush ferns beyond the window running along the staircase or to mentally abandon the activity of the lobby. Whatever the reason (and there seemed to be plenty of room to configure them differently), it seems condescending and needlessly irritating. I noticed that many people were using the stair opposite, which was “normal” in its rise and run.

The architects carry the symbolic and psychological resonance of the lobby/savannah space into the materials themselves. For example, on the savannah/lobby level, the floor is a light Italian porphyry stone (known for its high strength, resistance to chemicals, and lack of slipperiness) to represent bedrock and the ground plane. “Even the floors bear the mark of architects determined to leave nothing to chance,” wrote the San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design writer, John King. “The paving stones were quarried in Italy and have a syncopated pattern that comes from being cut at random lengths. The bronze ventilation grills, meanwhile, were acid-washed so as to blend visually with the paving.” In contrast, on the second floor (linked to the ground floor by a grand staircase in eucalyptus), both the floor and the ceiling is clad in a sustainable hardwood, so that we are literally embraced by “treeness.”

Like much of the rest of the galleries and interconnecting spaces, the savannah lobby offers opportunities for both “prospect” and “refuge,” that is, for scanning our environment from a secure point place or retreating from it, or as writer Gaston Bachelard puts it in The Poetics of Space, to have recourse to both the “attic” and “cave,” which humans seek in an ideal environment. Because we began as tree-dwellers who later dropped to the forest floor, we also are adapted to what is called “canopy” lighting – that is, dappled light through the leaves and branches above us, originating from the above. The de Young has many different kinds of lighting: skylights, filtered light, light through the perforated metal screens that mimics the diaphanous quality of the surrounding trees, full-height windows that extend out to and embrace the ground plane.

On a much larger scale than the savannah/lobby, the kinked roof overhang on the west, provides a strong branch of protection for the sprawling terrace below without a feeling of enclosure because the cantilevered overhang is so high above the ground. It also serves to compositionally “lock in” Walter Hood’s landscaping and the Barbro Osher Sculpture Garden here, highlighted by a sculpture by James Turrell. The cantilever also gestures to the Japanese Tea Garden beyond. This connection is not insignificant, as the tea garden is a city jewel in its flawless evocation of Japanese traditions of landscaping and ideas of beauty; that these profound ideals can be evoked with such apparent ease even as they are compressed into a tiny footprint is remarkable.

However, this forceful arm of a cantilever oddly does not provide shade from the California sun, often unrelenting even in San Francisco. The outdoor portion of the handsome café is covered in the kind of thick plastic sheeting used for outdoor weddings, giving what could be another opportunity for a clever shading mechanism a distinctly cheesy ambiance. While the entire terrace looks like a marvelous venue for an gala evening event, the meshed underside of the canopy illuminated to great effect, here the protection is largely symbolic, not functional.

The 144-foot-tall tower (only 19 feet taller than its predecessor), devoted to research and education, speaks to an even larger urban scale. It is incrementally twisted a total of 37 degrees from the ground to the ninth floor, and stretches into a parallelogram with increased floor area as the tower rises from its compact base which nestles into the outline of the main building. Thus, the “non-intuitive” nature of a tower that gets wider as it gets taller has a clear purpose in gaining usable space without enlarging the museum’s footprint.

The tower demands movement. It never looks the same as one walks around it, and affords different views of the city when inside it. And only from the observation deck does the overall plan of the entire building become obvious. One gazes down on the building’s “fifth façade,” that is, the roof plane with its standing seams of copper which seem to flow like a river. Only from this bird’s eye view can one see the “slashed” building with cuts so deeply invasive that it appears to be three separate but linked buildings.

The tower’s precise 37 degree twist also has a role in speaking to civic memory and history: the bottom of the tower is aligned with the established tree-studded grid of the Music Concourse, offset to the city grid, while the top of the tower is aligned with the larger north-south street grid to the east.

Two additional features are worth noting because of their impact on the viewer. Fong and Chan were able to convince the city’s fire department to move the required exit stairs from the core to the outside of the tower, so that the running rhythm of the staircases reads from the exterior. This, however, is only possible because the copper mesh wrapping the building is quite diaphanous, permitting the structure to be visually permeable. Even the trees beyond can be recognized through the mesh. Were the tower’s cladding opaque, it would appear not only stolid but threatening.

Just south of the tower and closer to the city, the street, the buses on Fulton Street and its public, a special children’s entrance leads out to a children’s sculpture garden filled with a fog machines, paths and greenery scaled to kids. It was a delight to visit.

Ornament and Skin: Copper and Canopies

While the architects originally envisioned a façade that expressed the rich variety of collections within, the 500-by-40-foot copper-panelled face of the primary building does no such thing. In part, its monolithic horizontal sweep seems rather to refer the “universal themes” in art shared by all humanity that Norris referred to, a sweep that is only possible because the panels were horizontally positioned.

The treatment of the 7,200 copper panels adorning the building is a tour de force in manipulating perception. Although some critics have decried the façade’s lack of articulation, scale and the dynamics of approach have to be considered here. The break defining the entrance, where the lower part of the copper sheathing angles inward like a gentle funnel, reduces the elevation’s scale. From afar, the perforated panels subtly animate the volume. The closer one gets, the more work the panels do to further break down the scale of the building into manageable bits. “The 'interactive way' in which the perforations appear to the viewer who walks nearby them succeed in bringing the overall scale of the building down to the user level. That's what's important,” says environmental/experimental psychologist Dr. James Wise, clinical associate professor of psychology at Washington State University, Richland. “What a scale of ornamentation does is to allow that sort of interaction at varying levels of perceptual distance. I think that what de Young shows is that if you take a large, modern building, make a few 'proportional resonances' in terms of form, openings, and windows, but then do something really engaging on the small scale of casual user interactions, you end up with a successful modern counterpoint to a scale of traditional building ornament: a different way of thinking about ornament to achieve roughly the same end.”

While redwood was considered for the façade because of its long associations to Bay Area architecture, the architects chose copper for its durability, malleability, and light weight. Mimicking the surrounding earth and foliage, copper’s ability to variously oxidize to shades of green and brown, depending on where each panel was located, was also attractive. Finally, copper was inherently more ‘formal’ than soft redwood and could be detailed more crisply (though the effect is anything but crisp), befitting a civic institution.

The devising and production of the panels was a combination of low- and high-tech, and although the production of the panels relied on computer and cad- cam technology, its conception did not.. Hammered copper, after all, can be seen on buildings thousands of years old and was an especial pet of the Art Nouveau. Herzog and de Meuron, whose 180-member firm is constantly experimenting with materials in their Basel workshop, were already familiar with the effects they could achieve with cheap sheet metal and plunged into a new round of exploring copper. Pixilated photographs – photographs broken down into digitized images of some of the trees in the park, be cam e an abstract pattern rendered as dimples, small bends, and perforated holes ranging in size. The result is a building doubly wrapped by a park, in a sense.

However, only fast production techniques and a sophisticated computer system to cut, punch and emboss the panels could realize 7,200 panels in an economical and timely way. Working with Project Manager Deborah Frieden and Fong and Chan, the panels and their attachment system were produced by the renowned A. Zahner Company in Kansas City, Missouri. Zahner is a family firm 110 years old that not only works with the world’s best contemporary architects but has a stellar list of some early Modernist buildings for which it has supplied special metal, such as the 1949 Kaufmann Desert House by Richard Neutra.

As you walk past a series of panels (best experienced at the observation deck), the punched holes appear to change shape from ellipses, seen at an angle, to circles, when standing directly in front of them. “That confers a dynamic quality to the panels and to the perception of the building,” said Wise. Were the panels to be untreated, the building would feel static and lifeless.

Thus this is hard-working copper. It functions not just as a secondary shading (and thus cooling) device for the inhabitants of the building, whether human or art/artefact. It also functions on behalf of visual and emotional appeal (which is an important function for architecture) in acting as ornament.

All these ideas, whether spatial, material, or superficial (in the best sense), have created a building that proffers trustworthiness along with the promise of mystery and adventure. “The building should stress that moment of the real encounter,” Jacques Herzog said. “This has always been a fact, and it has become even more crucial today in a world dominated by digital information technology. It’s the only true asset left for architecture.”

Despite its huge size, “I think the thing that truly surprises me about this building is its intimacy,” said de Young’s Norris. That speaks to a building that offers many different ways to have ‘real encounters.’