Add to favorites Examiner Bio

Up on the roof: SFMOMA's ultra chic rooftop garden

  SFMOMA's rooftop sculpture garden sits atop the parking garage (photo courtesy: SFMOMA)

 

That’s about to change, when the public gets its first glimpse of the new rooftop sculpture garden at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) this Sunday.

 

Architect Mark Jensen and SFMOMA have pulled off a trifecta: a deft insertion of the new garden into an iconic building; a nuanced backdrop of polished concrete, lava stone, glass, and machiche wood; and an installation of sculptures ranging from the artistic giants, Henry Moore and Alexander Calder, to a new generation of sculptors, like Ranjani Shettar.

 

Fitting a new element into the well known Mario Botta SFMOMA building was the subject of a design competition hosted by the museum. Jensen realized the key to making the garden work was establishing a natural connection between the garden and the former the back wall of the fifth floor gallery space. Perching the garden on top of the museum’s parking structure was the easy part; creating a functional and effortless flow between the existing building and the new would prove to be more difficult. Jensen finesses the difficulty with a two-pronged solution—punching out a new doorway from an existing gallery and, in one of those flashes of design brilliance, adding a gently sloping walkway from the existing elevator lobby to the garden.

 

The garden itself is actually two gardens separated by an indoor pavilion. Here we see the subtlety of Jensen’s garden; the design had to be powerful, yet understated, the sculptures had to occupy center stage rather than the architecture. The power of the garden and pavilion spaces emanates from the sheer location one hundred feet or so above the street surrounded by the San Francisco skyline. The underlying strength of this design resides with the selection of elegant materials and, more importantly, the fine detailing of those materials. It is this nuanced effect—big bold large scale sculptures within a walled plaza of effortless architectural connections—that makes the place worthy of great art.

 

As every architect knows, but few can pull off, it’s the detailing, the connections, that separate the merely good from the excellent. Look carefully at the grey lava stone wall in the garden and you’ll see a small notch running along its base. The notch provides space for a gravel trough for rainwater runoff; it also creates the illusion that the wall “floats” every so slightly above the concrete deck. Observe the sliding glass door system that allows the pavilion to be completely opened to the garden; the door tracks blend integrally into the ceiling system. These are the small but important touches that appear so simple but in fact require hours to design properly; they are the dividing line between merely good and excellent.

 

And what of the sculptures themselves? Magnificent, varied, and, yes, fun. But why believe me when you can click on the high tech slide show below? For that matter, why bother to look at a slide show when you can see the rooftop garden for free this Sunday, Mother’s Day?