If You Ever Wanted to Wear a Museum, Today Is Your Lucky Day

SFMOMA called up three architects and an industrial designer and asked them to make jewelry. They’re what you might call promotional pieces, based on the design of the museum's iceberg-like new expansion, opening to the public in May after nearly three years of construction.

Last year we noted that although the addition is 10 stories high, museum honchos and the designers from Norwegian architecture Snohetta firm talk about it in downright dainty terms. Now the $600 million-plus building is wearable, starting at $95.

Many of the pieces imitate the new building’s trademark rippling fiberglass façade, made up of 700 individual panels each as unique as snowflakes, according to project manager Lara Kauffman. The design is meant to evoke the waters of the bay and the rolling mass of the city fog.

The architects tapped included New Orleans’ Marion Cage McCollam, a Columbia graduate who also designs housewares, New York-based Andrea Panico, who specializes in "little architecture" jewelry, Diana Schimmel, originally from Uruguay and now designing buildings in Buenos Ares, and Alice Roche, a Berkeley architecture grad who ditched a career in buildings to design reclaimed metals jewelry.

SFMOMA

• New Museum is Heavyweight [Curbed SF]
• Starchitect City [San Francisco Magazine]
• Museum store [SFMOMA]