SFMOMA and Snøhetta Sculptural Façade: The Modernist Temple

Why is it significant?

Stand in the public entrance court of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art at 151 Third Street, gazing up at one of the premier modern art complexes in the world.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand in the public entrance court of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art at 151 Third Street, gazing up at one of the premier modern art complexes in the world. Originally founded in 1935 as the San Francisco Museum of Art under visionary director Grace McCann Morley, SFMOMA made history as the first museum on the West Coast devoted exclusively to twentieth-century modern art. In 1995, the institution opened this purpose-built flagship designed by Swiss architect Mario Botta, anchored by a dramatic tiered brick facade and a towering, truncated striped granite turret.

In 2016, the museum completed a monumental ten-story expansion designed by renowned Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta, more than doubling its exhibition space to four hundred sixty thousand square feet. Look up at the building's striking eastern facade, enveloped by more than seven hundred unique rippling panels of fiberglass-reinforced polymer. The undulating white surface was inspired by the billowing marine fog and rhythmic waves of San Francisco Bay, creating dynamic patterns of light and shadow that shift throughout the day.

Enter the free ground-floor public atrium to marvel at Richard Serra's monumental weatherproof steel sculpture 'Sequence', curving gracefully through the gallery like an ancient canyon. On the third-floor outdoor sculpture terrace grows the largest public living wall in the United States, densely planted with over nineteen thousand native California plants. Every surrounding viewpoint, historic brick facade, and open-air plaza tells an essential chapter of California's ongoing transformation from a rugged frontier town into a world-renowned Pacific metropolis. Every surrounding viewpoint, historic brick facade, and open-air plaza tells an essential chapter of California's ongoing transformation from a rugged frontier town into a world-renowned Pacific metropolis.

SFMOMA holds over thirty-three thousand works of modern and contemporary painting, sculpture, and photography, including masterpieces by Henri Matisse, Frida Kahlo, and Andy Warhol.

Walk north along Third Street toward Mission Street to the Museum of the African Diaspora.