San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California, Exterior elevation
Mario Botta
Swiss, born 1943
1994
A charcoal-on-paper architectural elevation in which Mario Botta sketches the SFMOMA exterior as a composition of stacked geometric volumes centered on a monumental circular oculus, aiming to convey the building’s mass, symmetry, and civic presence.
What strikes you is the raw, tactile charcoal—dense background shading, cross-hatching and bold linear bands that sculpt blocky, almost toy-like masses around a sunlike round window, giving the drawing a diagrammatic yet visceral sense of weight and monumentality.
The drawing exemplifies late-20th-century architectural thinking that revived archetypal geometry and sculptural form for cultural buildings, and it shows how an architect’s expressive hand-drawn studies shape a museum’s public identity.
Medium
Charcoal on paper
Dimensions
20 x 28 3/4" (50.8 x 73 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Gift of the architect in honor of Lily Auchincloss
Accession
376.1994
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
