The Asian Art Museum - View - San Francisco's new museum

Architectural Review, The, June, 2003 by Paula Deitz

Gaetana Aulenti and George Sexton's contributions have helped to make San Francisco's newly-reopened Asian Art Museum more than simply a museum of art and artefacts.

When San Francisco's Asian Art Museum reopened this spring in its new home, the collections completed an odyssey that began in 1932 when its original donor, the Chicago industrialist Avery Brundage, fell in love with Chinese art at a Burlington House exhibition in London. Subsequently, he acquired over 7000 artworks from China as well as Japan, Korea and South-East Asia; and, in 1959, he donated them to San Francisco where he felt they could best serve as a study collection for its ever-increasing population of Pacific Rim cultures. Since 1966, this comprehensive collection, more than doubled by other donations and acquisitions, has been housed in a wing of the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park. Outside Washington, downtown San Francisco boasts the largest concentration of Beaux-Arts buildings in an American city. Anchored by the City Hall at one end, Civic Center Plaza is one of those monumental urban spaces that seeks to preserve the ideals of antiquity in its architecture, which in this ca se includes a Civic Auditorium, Opera House and Symphony Hall. In 1987, after the Main Library, across from City Hall, was decommissioned in favour of a brand new (but less ideal) library across the street, the then mayor handed over the old Main Library to the Asian Art Museum in lieu of expanding in Golden Gate Park.

Designed in 1917 by George W. Kelham, the library's facades with colonnaded gallery and high-arched windows concealed a drab Eshaped internal structure with gloomy though functional wells that spread light into the reading rooms. An even more difficult problem for its conversion was to transform sedentary spaces into an active procession of galleries. And although the building was not listed, there was a sense of grandeur to be preserved in a central stairwell that led to an ornate catalogue room and interior loggia. The difficult job of retrofitting the historic library for adaptive reuse as a museum went to Gaetana Aulenti of Milan.

While Aulenti's Musee d'Orsay in Paris still feels and sounds like a railway station, in San Francisco she has succeeded in making a cohesive museum building. First, she solidified the structure by creating light and airy enclosed spaces out of the former dingy wells, and second, the new circulation patterns evolve into a journey that practically obliterates the memory of the library (though the great catalogue room with its decorative ceiling and Palladian windows has become a new ceremonial hall for San Francisco). The massiveness of the former library supports Aulenti's drapery folds of V-shaped skylights set into sky-blue trusses. She calls the new open ground floor of the enclosures in the north and south court a piazza. The former exterior windows, now covered with sycamore lattice screens, look down on the comings and goings and an attractive series, in this case, of museum store windows.

No sooner do visitors come through the main entrance than they are barricaded from moving up the grand staircase by the long museum front desk and instead veer to the right to the far end of the piazza and a two-storey escalator (or glass-enclosed lifts) leading directly to the top-floor gallery spaces. This is a moment of divide: a glass-enclosed balcony overlooking San Francisco on one side and on the other, at the gallery entrance, a stone Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu God of literature and pleasure. Another mood and the hand of another architect prevail in the galleries, that of George Sexton, the Washington DC museum installation and lighting designer known for his open-storage study centres at both the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

With more than 2500 objects on view from seven different cultural areas over a period of 6000 years, the challenge was how to display each work so that it remains memorable in its own space. Also, despite the museum's all-encompassing name, Emily Sano, the museum director, reminds visitors in the opening panel that "'Asia" is a term invented by the Greeks and Romans ... to indicate the land mass east of the Ural Mountains'. The actual commonality she prefers to highlight among the cultures is Buddhism, and the galleries have been arranged to follow its path, beginning with India and ending with Japan in an identical floor of galleries just below. (The high-ceilinged reading room was divided into two floors.) Sexton has created what he calls 'an art wall', a box, as it were, within the box of the museum s own walls, with all the intimacy implied by that image of a treasure trove preserved in individual nooks and crannies. Yet, there is never a sense of clutter, for like the open shelves and pedestals, every sh owcase, whether recessed, projecting or free-standing, is cleanly aligned as a custom-made platform for each artifact. (All galleries were laid out in scale models even before drawings.) In one display wall for Japanese netsuke, for example, the configuration of individual slotted shelves drew its inspiration from the linear flow of a landscape scroll painting. The overall installation gains additional drama from the colour palette of walls and cases, beginning in India with a subtle greygreen that blends with the sculptures and moving through a rich red for the Himalayas and to a cool celadon for China. With the exception of general wall panels, display labels are placed horizontally on the cases and pedestals rather than vertically so that viewers will absorb the art before the information.