The new de Young: You call that an art museum?

Ken Alexander

in the editoral section of the Sunday San Francosco Examiner 2/13/00

IF EVERTHING seems to be going too well and you need a good kick in the stomach to restore your usual feeling of impending doom, take a turn out to the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park.
There in you will find the most massive propaganda effort for the most ill-conceived piece of construction in recent memory.
But before you subject yourself to this brain-washing blitz, wander through the galleries with their magnificent works of art, displayed in serene, tasteful array. Stand at either end of the glorious Hearst Court and gaze around at the walls, ceiling and even the floor and feel the sense of permanence, grandeur, and timelessness.
Enjoy the inner piece that says you are surrounded by the product of talented people who designed with and eye toward history and beauty.
Remember the crowds that have filled these halls, some for special exhibits, others for gala parties such as the annual Bouquets to Art, which has been shifted to the Palace of the Legion of Honor because of earthquake retrofit on the old de Young.
Now force yourself to proceed to the Propaganda Pavilion where the design for the substitute de Young is on display. You will discover many forms of presentation—architects’ plans; color renderings of how the new, replacement museum is supposed to look; a large table model complete with miniature trees, cars and people and, the piece de resistance, a color movie, a la George Lucas, with weird, phony, alienesque humanoids strolling through endless channels of glass and plastic—stark, cold, impersonal, a frightening tableau out of "2002, A Spacious Odyssey." The movie is accompanied by spooky, grinding sounds alleged to be music, burping from twin speakers high above the screen. This is the edifice designated to replace our beloved de Young.
The structure has been compared by it detractors to a long, flat warehouse, a disservice to warehouses. A warehouse has an honest ugliness, with few pretensions of "spatial resonance, expanding intimacy" or other such contrived, artsy-crafty gobbledygook.
This Affair is hard to pigeonhole as, thankfully, there are few like it anywhere. The nearest I can come to a comparison might be the United States Pavilion at the 2015 International Exposition in Murmansk, cosponsored by Dow Corning Glass and Bechtel Construction Corp.
After ingesting the models and the movie, turn your attention to the written excuses for this travesty, spread over the entire wall in immaculate, sans serif type.
I’ll eschew names; suffice to say various proponents, including the architects, sing hosannas in an effort to camouflage what is a blatant case of emperor’s new clothes. One example: The strange bulge rising over one end of the new de Young is described as a visual link to the tower of the old de Young, maintaining and emotional tie to the past. As Colonel Potter on M*A*S*H would say, "Horse hockey."
One can only wonder how this whole operation managed to get this far without the peasantry rising as one and attacking the perpetrators with scythes and pruning hooks. After all, San Francisco and it inhabitants have been either praised or ridiculed for their dogged devotion to symbols of The City’s colorful past.
The miles of rococo Victorian houses, lovingly maintained, surely aren’t efficient dwelling machines, but woe be unto he who would replace them.
The aforementioned Place of Legion of Honor was closed for a long time for a retrofit; it could simply have been razed and replaced with a great, flat shed of the type being offered here. Anybody what to say that should have been done?
There’s even a brouhaha going on over the attempts to save the plastic dachshund head from the former Doggie Diner on the grounds that it’s a historic relic of the recent past in San Francisco.
No one (well, almost no one) wants a halt to all things new—provided there are useful, efficient and, if not attractive, at least not offensive, either in appearance or in purpose. This attempt to replace a beloved landmark with a misbegotten mishmash fails on all counts.
If, as is claimed, valuable traveling exhibitions won’t come here due to the earthquake danger, do a complete retrofit; it can’t cost as much as total destruction and replacement with a dog.
I, for one, don’t mind the great I-beams propping up the de Young’s old walls; apparently they make it safe enough to allow people in. If more of the same would reassure the traveling exhibitors, install more.
There’s even a certain panache to honest iron work, exposed for all to see, stating that w love the old girl and that we’re not ashamed of her prostheses, necessary because we know all about earthquakes.
Heck, the flying buttresses holding up Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris serve the same purpose, there was much wringing of hands when they were put in place. But do you suppose Parisians would stand still for leveling Notre Dame and replacing it with an ecclesiastical Costco?
We’ve already got the Vaillancourt Fountain, reason enough to put the kibosh on the bizarre proposals for public projects. As someone once said, he who ignores history is doomed to step in it, or something like that.

Other BUILDINGS and MUSEUMS by Herzog & de Meuron Architekten AG.