With a series of outdoor spaces oriented around a new building, the firm plans to create connections to San Francisco's Yerba Buena neighborhood. When Mario Botta’s building for SFMOMA opened in 1995, the heavy street presence of the museum’s stacked blocks of red-orange brick—protecting a striped, periscope-like turret—created a formidable cultural outpost among the scruffy warehouses that then dominated the area south of Market Street in San Francisco. Today, the Oslo- and New York-based firm Snøhetta unveiled details of its plan to expand the museum by 235,000-square-feet with a new 10-story concrete building. It will connect SFMOMA via a system of alleys, walkways, and plazas to the surrounding neighborhood, which has been transformed over the last decade by development spurred in part by the pioneering institution. “The next stage for the museum is about reaching out and opening to surroundings,” says Snøhetta principal Craig Dykers, “It’s about becoming more extroverted.”
Working with local firm EHDD, Snøhetta conceived a scheme that tucks the new tower, a narrow form housing 130,000 square feet of additional exhibition space, behind the existing building. The plan invites visitors up from surrounding streets though 40,000 square feet of multi-level public space bounded by an 18-foot-wide promenade. According to today’s announcement, the museum, which averaged 625,000 annual visitors over the last ten years, plans to raise $555 million for the expansion—revised up from $480 million—with more than $200 million reserved for the endowment and the remainder going toward capital costs. So far, it has pulled in $437 million toward that goal. Groundbreaking is scheduled for summer 2013, with completion expected in 2016.
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