(1931 x 1167 px, 72 dpi)
"It's been the longest birth but the most beautiful baby!" beamed Dede Wilson. In 1995, to rebuild the earthquake-damaged San Francisco museum, Wilson began private campaign funding to create a new de Young. It was a long wait, but the new museum is now the largest cultural gift that the private sector has ever given to the public in the US! Over 70,000 donations from $5 to $10 million created this world-class art museum.
Acclaimed for inventive, imaginative work, Swiss Architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron designed a dynamic, in-flux object, symbolizing the nature surrounding it as well as the art constantly interpreted within. They created the building as a "living entity," one that has a "heart," a "skin," and a gracefully "growing body" as it lives and changes through many generations to come.
The heart of the building is free space for the public. Visitors can eat, meet, and take in the view from the building's tower without having to pay admission to the museum.
"The living skin of the building," stated de Meuron, "was needed to wrap and interweave nature into the architecture as alive as a forest of trees." The image of a tree, as if looking up from underneath into a sunlit tree canopy, was utilized. Many digitalized photographs of different canopy images were used, flattening the images with pixilation and translating it directly from computer images to the physical reality of the copper panels. The relationships of perforations and embossed sections within the 3600 copper panels create shifting and unexpected forms in the changing light of the day. The building will continually be transformed when aging slowly turns the color of the copper to blue-green.
"We will see change for 20 years, while the landscape evolves to grow up and transform itself," landscaper Walter Hood added. "It is a gift of growth, an exciting public space for kids and adults to all use."
Many aspects of the building are one-of-a-kind. The dramatic shape of the elegant tower completely destabilizes as one moves around it, looking firmly rooted like a strong tree viewed one way, yet looking unstable and weak from another angle. Unique and breathtaking views of San Francisco can be enjoyed from inside; the twist of the tower was done to position its relationship as to the layout of the city and many San Francisco landmarks. And now, the tall tower itself has become a new landmark and can be seen from hilltops in the city.
Some of the delights that pleasantly direct one's path while visiting are unique wall angles allowing visuals of one room to blend into the next, warm eucalyptus woods, Italian stone floors, placement of tall windows, decks with overviews of the park, and interior angled spaces for viewing outside plants of many shapes and textures.
Visit www.thinker.org for more aspects on the new de Young.
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