The de Young Museum and the Garden That Surrounds It
The de Young Museum and the Garden That Surrounds It
The de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park was rebuilt in 2005 by Herzog & de Meuron — the same Swiss architects who did the Tate Modern and the Walker — and the building is a copper-clad box that was designed to oxidize and turn green over time, slowly becoming the same color as the park's eucalyptus trees. It is currently somewhere between bronze and verdigris, and the transformation is the building's longest-running exhibit.
Inside, the collection spans American art from the colonial era to the present, with particular depth in textile arts, Pacific Island cultures, and the art of Africa and the Americas. The Oceanic galleries hold war canoes, ancestor figures, and tapa cloth that connect San Francisco to its Pacific identity in ways the European-focused museums downtown cannot. The American painting galleries include Bierstadt landscapes that look like advertisements for the West made by someone who actually went there, and contemporary installations that rotate often enough that the museum never feels settled.
The Hamon Observation Tower is free — even without museum admission — and the ninth-floor view is the best in the park: the Sutro Tower to the southwest, the Pacific beyond the dunes, Golden Gate Park spreading below you in a geometry of gardens and museums that Frederick Law Olmsted would have recognized with pride. On clear days the Farallon Islands, 30 miles offshore, appear as dark bumps on the horizon line, and the city feels like what it was before anyone built on it: the edge of a continent, facing west.
What visitors miss: The sculpture garden between the de Young and the California Academy of Sciences. Most visitors walk through it without stopping, headed for one museum or the other. But the garden holds large-scale works placed among the trees with a care that makes each sculpture feel like it chose its own spot, and sitting on the bench near the Calder mobile while the fog rolls through the treetops is a ten-minute meditation that costs nothing and delivers everything.