San Francisco's revamped modern art museum eyes global splash

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art reopens in mid-May after an ambitious $305 million expansion and facelift that aims to rival the world-class art spaces of New York, Paris or London.
 
The revamped museum will be unveiled May 14 following a three-year upgrade entrusted to the Norwegian architecture firm Snohetta -- best known for the dramatic new Alexandria Library in Egypt -- that included more than doubling the exhibition space.
 
The brick structure that has housed the SFMOMA since 1995 in downtown San Francisco is now attached to a huge 10-floor "annex." Outside, a wavy white facade made of more than 700 fiberglass-reinforced polymer panels seems to come alive as the light bounces off at different angles.    

Snohetta says the facade is meant to represent the waves in the San Francisco bay and the city's iconic fog banks.
 
At ground level, large glass windows invite pedestrians to enter and visit the massive steel artwork by Richard Serra titled "Sequence," or the "Untitled" eight-meter-wide white mobile that hangs in the atrium above the central staircase.
 
"The signature material in this building is glass," said museum director Neal Benezra.
 
"You know right away that we want you to come in. We're transparent, we're open, and we're free at the first floor level."  

When SFMOMA opened its doors in the 1990s, the neighborhood was shabby and affordable. Today the area has dramatically gentrified and become a symbol of the vast income disparity caused by the high-tech boom that began in nearby Silicon Valley.    

The new museum, Benezra stressed, "embraces the community" it is rooted in.
         
The SFMOMA expansion more than doubles its galleries to 170,000 square...