In anticipation of the newly renovated San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which opens to the public on May 14, we've been covering it like mad, giving you a preview of what's to come, as well as the top 10 must-see items at the museum. Today our friends at Wired released a cool scroll-through 3D rendering of the Snøhetta-designed expansion.
Why so cool? Well, they reveal secret tidbits of SFMOMA construction info like this:
More Light: To ensure that the glass-enclosed ground floor gallery, currently home to Richard Serra’s 213-ton sculpture Sequence, receives the maximum amount of natural light, the window mullions, those sticklike joints between panes of glass, needed to be as thin as possible. Using torch-cut plate steel instead of extruded aluminum allowed Snøhetta to shrink the width and depth of the mullions by half, allowing more gallery light and street visibility.
And this:
Hidden LEDs: Rows of overhead reflectors bounce light from concealed LEDs down onto the artworks, bathing them in a diffuse and art-enhancing light. Curators can color-control and dim light levels in persnickety 1 percent increments.
Clearly, we're suckers for smart illumination.
Wired's scroll-through 3D rendering, which went live today, is the perfect accompaniment to Detour's guide of the new museum, available on iOS, offering a location-aware narrative tour of the premises. Let The Verge tell you all about it.