San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Contemplating an expansion to house its ever-growing collection and highly ambitious curatorial and educational agendas, SFMoMA approached Lord Cultural Resources for a comprehensive, twenty-year assessment of its functional space needs. After a successful 2003 partnership that resulted in a functional improvement of the museum’s lobby, Lord Cultural Resources again undertook an independent study of the facilities in 2005. This study was commissioned in order to clarify the museum’s space needs. Our findings were crucial to ongoing conversation regarding SFMoMA’s future development, crucially informing the scope and size of any potential additions to Mario Botta’s 1995 design.

Taking the main building, nearby office space and off-site storage under its purview, Lord Cultural Resources produced a space list that identified space concerns for SFMoMA’s adequate operation over the next two decades. Balancing availability with need, the space list lends valuable insight for any architectural exercise of expansion, and marks Lord Cultural Resources’ second successful spatial intervention with SFMoMA and its esteemed collection of modern and contemporary art. In 2010, Lord Cultural Resources was again commissioned to develop the Facility Strategy for further growth with the acquisition of the Fisher Collection, a remarkable gift from the late Donald Fisher. Having just commemorated its 75th anniversary, SFMOMA is beginning a new chapter in its history. It is beginning a transformative and ambitious building project that will firmly establish SFMOMA as one of America’s great art museums and one of the world’s greatest modern and contemporary art museums.