As part of its 50th anniversary celebrations, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco has announced major renovation and expansion plans by wHY Architecture. The practice is expected to design a new 12,000-square-foot exhibition pavilion, reconfigure the Museum’s existing galleries, and modernize its education and public programming spaces. Work will begin in 2017.
"The new pavilion will underscore San Francisco’s cultural diversity, create one of the nation’s premier exhibition spaces dedicated to Asian art, and increase the number of special exhibitions on view for visitors," says the Museum.
The flexible pavilion "will add about 9,000 square feet of unified gallery space to the east side of the museum’s first floor. It will sit atop an existing lower-level wing on the museum’s Hyde Street side that was built in the 1990s." It will be one of the city's largest art exhibition spaces.
“The significance of the museum is clear when you consider that the combined populations of Asian countries account for more than 60 percent of the world’s population,” said Timothy Kahn, Asian Art Commission vice chair and Asian Art Museum Foundation president. “Art is the universal language of a global community.”
