More Museums

New Centers to Celebrate a Variety of Cultures

Experts say the construction surge for fine arts buildings in San Francisco is helping to offset the slump in commercial construction. More than $700 million worth of projects are either in design or under construction.

By Thomas York

The San Francisco Conservatory of Music's campus includes preservation and restoration of the four-story-tall walls of a 90-year-old building that once housed an athletic club (photo by Thomas York).

San Francisco's long and rich history of cultural venues continues with seven construction projects in various development stages.

"Museums--that's what people come to San Francisco to see," said William Moreno, executive director of the Mexican Museum, which is preparing to build a $34 million home in the South of Market district. "They put San Francisco on the map as far as tourist attractions goes, and the city is a major tourist destination."

Projects under way or on the drawing board include:

• The $270 million, 390,000-sq.-ft. California Academy of Sciences' complex in Golden Gate Park in preconstruction. It will feature a 3-acre roof covered with native grasses and other vegetation. Renzo Piano Building Workshop of Italy and San Francisco-based Chong Partners Architecture are the designers. The general contractor had not been selected as of November, but Webcor Builders is providing preconstruction services. The overall cost of the project covers temporarily relocating the museum to the city's South of Market district while the new home is built.

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• The $135 million, 293,000-sq.-ft. M.H. de Young Museum features a 14-story observation tower looming above Golden Gate Park. San Francisco-based Swinerton Builders is the general contractor. Herzog & De Meuron Architects in Switzerland and Fong & Chan Architects in San Francisco designed the building.

• The $120 million, 138,000-sq.-ft. International Museum of Women at Pier 26 in the design phase. The San Francisco offices of AI Architecture and San Francisco-based Leddy Maytum Stacy are the designers.
  
  
• The $44.5 million, 75,000-sq.-ft. San Francisco Conservatory of Music campus under construction on Oak Street. San Francisco-based Simon Martin-Vegue Winkelstein Moris designed the high-rise campus. Swinerton is the general contractor.
  
  
• The $34 million, 63,000-sq.-ft.,Mexican Museum in planning, designed by Mexico City-based architect Ricardo Legorreta. San Francisco-based Plant Construction is the general contractor. The five-story structure will house the largest collection of Mexican and Mexican-American art in the United States.
  
  
  
• The $5 million, 20,000-sq.-ft Museum of African Diaspora (under construction) that occupies the bottom three floors of the 42- story-tall St. Regis Museum Tower hotel and condominium high-rise next to the Museum of Modern Art. Designed by the Freelon Group of Durham, N.C., the museum features a glass curtain wall framed by limestone cladding that sets it apart from the tower project. Webcor Builders is the general contractor.
  
  
• A new Jewish Museum in the fund-raising stage. Daniel Libeskind of New York, which designed the Berlin Jewish Museum, is the lead architect. The project was conceived in the dot-com boom and is being scaled back from its original $60 million price tag.

de Young's Fantastic Façade

The exterior of the new de Young structure features a striking, honey-combed facade covered with 950,000 lbs. of embossed copper cladding plates and 300,000 lbs. of glass. Attaching the cladding to the structure was particularly vexing, said Mike Strong, Swinerton's project manager.

No two pieces of the copper cladding are alike. Each is a different size and geometry. "The patterning is unique from panel to panel," Strong said. "Installing the panels was one of the never-ending series of re-inventing the wheel."

The cladding will weather to a forest green to match the trees and vegetation of the surrounding park.

Strong said some interior rooms stretch 420 ft. by 75 ft. Installation of the cantilevered trusses supporting those spaces was measured in degrees, minutes and seconds. Installing the trusses-no two of which are alike --took a great deal of care.

"If you're off by a couple of seconds, that's more than a foot," Strong added.

The exterior of the M.H. de Young Museum features a honeycombed facade comprised of 950,000 lbs. of embossed copper cladding plates and 300,000 lbs. of glass (photo by Thomas York).

A 144-ft.-high observation deck will overshadow one corner of the museum. The tower was particularly vexing because of its design, which looks like a series of trapezoid-like floors stacked above one another in haphazard fashion.

"It was designed along x, y and z coordinates rather than control lines on a grid," which required vertical as well as horizontal post-tensioning, Strong said.

In addition to Swinerton and the architectural team of Herzog & de Meuron Architects and Fong & Chan Architects in San Francisco, major principals on the de Young project include Rutherford & Chekene of Oakland, structural engineers; the San Francisco office of Ove Arup Group and Partners, which is performing the mechanical, electrical and plumbing and lighting design; and the San Francisco office of Hathaway Dinwiddie Co., which is providing construction coordination assistance.

Construction, which began with the official groundbreaking in June 2002, will be finished in March.

Swinerton is also the general contractor for a $50-million, 800-car underground public garage that will serve both the de Young Museum and the new Academy of Sciences. The garage is actually two structures to be connected by a passageway under Golden Gate Park's outdoor music concourse. The privately funded project, which got under way in the spring 2003, will be completed in the middle of the year.

Conservatory Was an Athletic Club

Two walls of the 90-year-old ballroom of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music will remain, left. The foundation has been finished for the facility's addition, right (photo by Thomas York).

The San Francisco Conservatory of Music's campus includes the restoration of the four-story front and rear walls of a 90-year-old building that once housed an athletic club.

Steel braces hold the fragile walls in place while construction workers pour the reinforced concrete foundation and erect the steel frame.

Ironworkers will then attach the masonry walls to the frame and plasterers will restore the Beaux Arts-like masonry facade.

Carla Pasqualini, the conservatory's director of marketing and communications, said designers have incorporated a former ballroom into the structure. Swinerton will protect and restore the ballroom's plaster ornamentation during construction.

"We're going to convert it into our main concert hall," she said.

Construction, which got under way in September 2003, will be completed in spring 2006.

The International Museum of Women will occupy Pier 26, one of the "finger" piers and cavernous sheds along San Francisco's historic waterfront.

Museum president Chris Yelton said the architects would retain most of the exposed wood beams and other original structural details in their design.

"We will be preserving and restoring the structure, and preserving all of the original woodwork," Yelton said. "It will be incredible."

Observers say the construction boom in fine arts buildings is helping to offset the slump in commercial construction.

The slump has helped the museums, too, in terms of holding down construction costs.

Deborah Frieden, the de Young museum's construction project manager, said trustees were under pressure to hold the line on costs because the work was partially funded through a bond measure.

Frieden said her staff worked closely with the general contractor and subs to ensure they grasped what the architects were trying to achieve.

"We had the advantage of bidding the project during the recession," she added. She said the architects also worked with the San Francisco office of cost-control consultants Davis Langdon & Adamson to establish estimates independent of the architects and general contractor at each step of the bidding process.

"The project was very complicated, so we wanted to make sure that the subcontractors understood the job," Frieden said. "Rather than grousing about the difficulties of the work, they embraced the challenge as a milestone in their careers."