San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) Review

With its brick facade and a striped central tower lopped at a lipstick-like angle, architect Mario Botta's SFMOMA building fairly screams "modern-art museum." Indeed it is. The stripes continue inside, from the black marble and gray granite of the floors right up the imposing staircase to the wooden slats on the ceiling. Taking in all of SFMOMA's four exhibit floors can be overwhelming, so having a plan is helpful. Keep in mind that the museum's heavy hitters are on floors 2 and 3. Floor 2 gets the big-name traveling exhibits and collection highlights such as Matisse's Woman with the Hat, Diego Rivera's The Flower Carrier, and Georgia O'Keeffe's Black Place 1. Photography buffs should hustle up to floor 3, with its works by Ansel Adams and Alfred Stieglitz. The large-scale contemporary exhibits on floors 4 and 5 can usually be seen quickly (or skipped). If it's on display, don't miss sculptor Jeff Koons' memorably creepy, life-size gilded porcelain Michael Jackson and Bubbles, on the fifth floor at the end of the Turret Bridge, a vertiginous catwalk dangling under the central tower. The window at the bridge's other end offers a great view over the Yerba Buena Gardens below. In 2009 the museum opened its fifth-floor, garage-top sculpture garden.

Seating in the museum can be scarce, so luckily Caffè Museo, accessible from the street, provides a refuge for quite good, reasonably priced drinks and light meals. It's easy to drop a fortune at the museum's large store, chockablock with fun gadgets, artsy doodads of all kinds, very modern furniture, and possibly the best selection of kids' books in town. No ticket is required to visit the lobby, so if it's the architecture you're interested in, save yourself the admission and have a gander for free.