With its elegant low-slung copper-clad building in a sophisticated garden setting and gravity-defying, twisting tower, the M.H. de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park will achieve every museum’s goal — to educate the public — about art as well as architecture.
Not since Frank Lloyd Wright’s futuristic Marin Civic Center was completed in 1957 has the Bay Area seen a significant new civic structure that does not affect a classical or postmodern pose. For architecturally conservative San Francisco, it’s the equivalent of St. Louis’ 1960s stainless steel arch, a gateway to bigger, more exhilarating ideas in a post-Bilbao Guggenheim age.