On a blustery day in February, Connie Wolf leads three trustees of the Contemporary Jewish Museum through a San Francisco construction site. The 63,000-square-foot facility, the new jewel in the thriving SoMa museum district, is shaping up for its opening June 8. Designed by Daniel Libeskind, it marries a landmark 1907 Willis Polk brick-front power substation with a vast geometric extension plated in luminous blue steel. A trustee asks how the building performed in recent rainstorms.
It didn’t leak, reports Wolf, ’81, the 24-year-old museum’s director and CEO. In fact, the rains were a blessing. “We were going to hire a waterproofing company,” and storms provided all the tests necessary.
Wolf has just flown back from New York, where Libeskind’s projects have included the controversial master plan for the World Trade Center site. Is it intimidating, working with an architect of international renown? Not at all. She says he’s “down-to-earth” and “personable,” and in any case, “He wasn’t famous when we started.” That was nine years ago.
Still, Wolf has some sympathy for the workers untangling Libeskind’s devilish details. Inside the blue extension, where no wall runs perpendicular to the floor, painters have jury-rigged a ladder. “They’re trying to figure out how to paint.”
Leaving the second-floor gallery, Wolf comes to one of her favorite spots. To her right is the overlook on the Grand Lobby, where quake-braced 1907 brick walls support substation pulleys and catwalks, preserved in gray paint. To her left, the freight elevator. “I love our freight elevator. Isn’t it beautiful?” Indeed, the elevator is very wide. “When it’s open,” she adds, “it gives you a sense of scale, of what it takes.”
The elevator will convey large installations and traveling exhibitions in many media. The Contemporary Jewish Museum aims to be a dynamic urban center, not a repository with a standing collection. Libeskind, a Polish-born postmodernist known for his jagged forms, based his building’s shape on the Hebrew letters yud and chet as they form the word l’chaim: “to life.” He has written that the facility— by blending a landmark building with a bold new silhouette, and flexible exhibition space with educational and meeting spaces—“opens itself to the diverse contemporary currents of life.”At the all-glass entrance to the Yud room, soaring to 60 feet at its peak, Wolf pauses.
“This door weighs a thousand pounds.” The trustees move next to the multipurpose room, at present a mess of paint buckets, sawhorses and plywood-covered carpet; soon a space with retractable seating that can accommodate a variety of video or performance events.
Informed about a change in the room’s paneling, trustee Joyce Linker, MA ’72, asks, “What does that do to the map of Jerusalem?” Lines crossing the room’s walls and ceilings echo the routes to Jerusalem on a 15th-century map that Libeskind found. Such symbolism suffuses the facility, although Wolf promises that visitors won’t have to know it all to enjoy the museum.
From glory to guts, our last stop. “Welcome to the basement!” says Wolf, as trustees admire networks of temperature, fire, electrical and electronic controls. “Here’s the loading dock we share with the Marriott and the Four Seasons. Our garbage will intermingle!”
SHEILA HIMMEL is a former writer for the San Jose Mercury News.
