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Wired Just Released a Scroll-Through 3D Rendering of SFMOMA, and It's Awesome

Secrets of the new SFMOMA revealed

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.