For the the September issue of Azure, I wrote a cover story about Snøhetta's sublime addition to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I still remember exploring the SFMOMA on my first visit to San Francisco in 2006, when the museum was located in a postmodern, fortress-like brick building built by Mario Botta in 1995.
The Snøhetta addition manages to retain and improve upon Botta's original spaces, while expanding the museum upwards and into the back alleys of a SoMa neighborhood that had undergone drastic change in the intervening 21 years since Botta's building opened. I was fortunate enough to cross paths at the SFMOMA's official opening with photographer Nic Lehoux, a longtime Azure contributor and fellow Canadian who was in town to shoot the cover. We scouted the building together, marveling at how Snøhetta managed to make use of those gritty back alleys. A partial view of the glacier-like façade we discovered via Natoma Street links the project to the hardboiled era of Dashiell Hammett's San Francisco.
Check out the full story, now available online at Azure's website.