Video shows new SFMOMA wing rising in less than a minute



Video courtesy of Earthcam.net

The public can’t get into the new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art quite yet, but you can watch the massive new building go from little more than a hole in the ground to the new unusually-skinned addition in a time-lapse video from the folks at EarthCam.

The video starts with the new addition as nothing more than a dirt patch in the South of Market area. As the time-lapse progresses, the brick building in the rear loses it’s facade, comes down and is rapidly replaced by the iron I-beam skeleton of the museum’s new wing, which opens to the public May 14.

The camera, a DSLR affixed overlooking the construction site, pans out as cranes stack layer upon layer and the building begins to take what The Chronicle’s urban design critic, John King, called its “slumped form.”

Image 1 of / 33 Caption Close Video shows new SFMOMA wing rising in less than a minute 1 / 33 Back to Gallery

Then comes the application of the more than 700 panels that make up the rippled, white skin of the edifice, easily its most notable feature, for better or for worse.

And then, in less than a minute, the cranes fall away and the addition stands as it does today, a brand new, $305 million expansion that adds 170,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor gallery space to San Francisco.

Kale Williams is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kwilliams@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sfkale