The de Young Museum Revisited
INSIDE THE MUSEUM
The meandering crack in the paving, which leads to the entrance courtyard and slices through Andy Goldsworthy’s sculpture of large rocks titled Drawn Stone, is a reminder of the Bay Area’s earthquake faults. Yet this reference to the physical environment seems at odds with the court’s minimalist design, which evokes an industrial setting. When people are not present to enliven the barren court, it seems more like a light well than a welcoming introduction to the museum.
Beyond the glazed entrance doors that line one side of the court, the lobby offers ticketing and information as well as access to the auditorium and the tower. The space flows into the main concourse with the two-story Diane B. and Alfred S. Wilsey Court, the hub of the main floor. The grand stairway to the upper floor is located on one side of the concourse.
Strontium, by Gerhard Richter, a wall-size artwork commissioned by Diane B. Wilsey in 2004 that occupies the court’s west wall is shown below.
The long hallway to the cafe opens off of the Diane B. and Alfred S. Wilsey Court.
The openness of the concourse is both dramatic and unpretentious. The space flows naturally in all directions, inviting visitors to experience the museum store, the Family Room with the Piazzone paintings where special events are held, and 20th and 21st century galleries in the northwest corner. The whiteness of these galleries recalls the white interiors that were favored in the Modern Movement era.
The interior garden courts, which trace an east-west course through the building, are enclosed with floor-to-ceiling glazed walls. They bring the park indoors and serve as vitrines to exhibit its vegetation.
A branching stairway behind the reception desk dips down to the lower floor and allows close views of the mounded beds covered with slate fragments and stones and planted with eucalyptus trees and Australian and Tasmanian tree ferns.
Although Walter Hood wanted to use sand in the courts to recreate the original surface, he realized that it could not be neatly contained. Reflecting on the fact that sand grains are multi-colored crystals, he reasoned that slate fragments and gravel could stand in for sand.
The wedge shaped stairway between the main and upper floors attracts attention by its use of beautiful Sydney Blue Eucalyptus wood on the stairs.
A window wall by the landing at the top of the stair has a view into the entry court below on one side and an overview of the Wilsey Court on the other. By taking a few steps to either side of the stairway visitors can survey the paths through the west and east galleries and choose the one they wish to follow. This choice of paths allows them to change direction without retracing their steps, a refreshing change from the prescriptive use of the “enfilade.” This French inspired linear progression of rooms caused people go to the end of the line, then reverse their path and see it all over again.
The challenge of housing the de Young’s eclectic collections made their location a priority in the design process. In addition to models of the building a full-scale steel-framed mock-up of one half of both the 19th century American art gallery and the 20th Century art gallery was built in a South San Francisco warehouse. Its size–a total of 40 square feet with 33-foot high ceilings–required a significant amount of structural engineering as well as a permit from the local building department. The designers used the mock-up to judge spatial proportions and architectural details as well as to assess the effectiveness of the light boxes used to daylight the galleries.
Commenting on the plan’s division of the exhibition space into three sections, the architects explained that, “We thought of a kind of organism with several limbs, like the fingers of a hand.” When the fingers interweave, the overlapping of cultures embodied in the artworks on display is revealed.
