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The reopening of the Museum of Present-day Art San Diego (MCASD) following a $105 million renovation and expansion delivers even more proof that Annabelle Selldorf is the museum whisperer. Ideal now, the German-born, New York City–based Ad100 architect is updating two sacred establishments, the Nationwide Gallery in London and the Frick Collection on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. MCASD, in La Jolla, opened in 1941 in a waterfront villa by pioneering modernist architect Irving Gill. Then, in 1996, Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates (VSBA) additional a postmodern addition that obscured a lot of Gill’s developing at the rear of exaggeratedly unwanted fat columns. Selldorf, who is stylistically agnostic, uncovered Gill’s façade though preserving a person of VSBA’s very best bits—an atrium with an intricately folded starburst-pattern ceiling. “It was significant,” she claims, while sitting on a bench overlooking the Pacific Ocean, “to make the evolution of the developing manifest.” In the course of action, she almost doubled the museum’s sizing, and quadrupled its exhibition space. (An auditorium, taller than everything buildable under current zoning legal guidelines, is now gallery area for larger sized artworks, including—in a reopening exhibition—pieces by Niki de Saint Phalle.)
The museum attributes two degrees of light-crammed galleries.Courtesy of MCASD
Given the waterfront website and the museum’s elaborate architectural record, Selldorf didn’t glance for geometric perfection, but in its place permitted disparate forms to coexist, proficiently giving the seaside village of La Jolla a new seaside village for artwork. What issues, the architect says, is that a museum so crucial to its community “is now open and out there. That tends to make me happy.” mcasd.org
