Page 13 of 15
San Francisco, California
It all will fall, fall right into place
Good news for people who were waiting for the Alaska slides to finally stop. Bad news for everyone else.
For reasons that could best be described as having made sense at the time, I decided that a late flight out of Fairbanks, a three hour layover at Anchorage and an overnight flight to San Francisco was somehow a good idea. After arriving way too early to my hotel and finding I had six or seven hours to kill before my room could even possibly be ready I decided to start walking west from Union Square all the way down to Golden Gate Park in order to see the (still) brand new de Young Museum, easily one of the most important buildings built in San Francisco in recent memory.
The museum, which opened two years ago, was designed by Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron. Cut right through its middle are two sloping green courtyards, each lined with glass and perforated copper panels that (like the rest of the building) promise a dramatic change once all that promised oxidation starts.
The de Young is more than a pretty building covered with perforated panels and all those courtyards, it is also an actual museum with a collection that's all over the place and (in my opinion at least) not nearly as compelling as the building itself. Still there are highlights like a James Turrell skyspace outside (everyone loves those), Gerhard Richter's really big photo mural by the stairs (everyone loves big things) and Andy Goldsworthy's totally appropriate bench height stones in one of the courtyards (everyone loves things that could pass for benches).
While most of that twisting tower is inaccessible to the regular visiting public, it's top level observation deck luckily is. The height of the tower is just enough to open up all the views you would expect to see, although a quickly rolling fog played havoc with all that during my all too brief visit. Luckily all of the sights to see weren't all far away. Across the street from the de Young, work is continuing on Renzo Piano's California Academy of Sciences Museum, complete with a big green (planted) two and a half acre roof and a projected LEED Platinum rating (a pretty big deal for anyone who understands such things). The new building is expected to open sometime next fall, creating another reason to visit San Francisco in the event you were still looking for one.
Out toward the sculpture garden the museum cantilevers dramatically in all its light permeating glory. Such a precarious structure that close to a fault line was (presumably) safely achieved using all sorts of structural trickery that may (or I guess may not) cause some of you to flash back to those Lateral Forces classes you're still trying to forget. According to an extremely comprehensive article on the Architectural Record site, the building has fun things like a rubber and flat sliding bearing isolation system, an actual moat that allows movement and 24 liquid dampers to absorb shockwaves.
A lot of the rest of the de Young pictures are pretty much self explanatory, good news for all and by "all" I think I really mean me. Unlike other slideshows, this extra heavy slideshow has not been all that easy to write. So many pictures (usually ten or twelve a page), each with its own story, each with its own life. It's been a bit draining, but fortunately it is coming quickly to its inevitable end and I remain blindly hopeful that my growing fatigue has not affected its quality all that much, at least so far. I would hate to think that I was somehow unable to meet that same high standard of run on sentences, subject headers that only I appreciate, stories that go nowhere and images of (let's just say) limited interest that we have all grown to love (or tolerate) through all these slideshows, through all these years.
