Quick answer
SFMOMA is the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, founded in 1935 as the first museum on the West Coast devoted to twentieth-century art. Mario Botta designed its 1995 building on Third Street, recognisable by the striped cylinder and its 130-foot skylight. Snohetta added a 235,000-square-foot wing that opened on 14 May 2016, built largely to hold the Fisher collection.
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The Museum That Waited Sixty Years
SFMOMA was founded in 1935, which made it the first museum on the West Coast built around twentieth-century art. Then it spent sixty years as a tenant. Its first home was the fourth floor of the Veterans Building at the Civic Center, up a staircase, above the war memorial. Its first director, Grace McCann Morley, ran it for a quarter of a century out of those borrowed rooms. The building you are looking at now did not arrive until January 1995: Mario Botta's brick block, sixty million dollars, with that black-and-white striped cylinder sliced off at an angle. Stand under it and look up. The skylight inside the cylinder is a hundred and thirty feet high, and the whole design is really an argument that a museum should be a landmark before it is a container.
A Family That Did Not Build Their Own
Then came the part nobody planned for. Doris and Donald Fisher started Gap here in 1969 and spent the next forty years buying postwar art — Calder, Richter, Warhol, Kelly, in quantity. Collections that size usually end in a private museum with the founder's name over the door, and the Fishers had drawings for exactly that. Instead, in 2009, the family agreed to lend roughly eleven hundred works to SFMOMA for a hundred years. Which left the museum with a problem most museums would like to have: nowhere near enough wall.
Growing a Building Behind a Building
The answer, from the Norwegian firm Snohetta, was to build behind Botta rather than knock him down. The new wing opened on the fourteenth of May, 2016 — two hundred and thirty-five thousand square feet, adding about a hundred and forty-two thousand square feet of galleries, roughly tripling what the museum could hang. Its east face ripples like something poured rather than built. Nearly fifteen thousand square feet of it is free to walk into with no ticket at all, which is unusual and deliberate. Go to the third-floor terrace and find the living wall: thousands of native plants, the largest public one in San Francisco. Walk around to Howard Street before you leave, so you can see the two buildings from behind and watch the ripple meet the stripes.