Wasn’t it a short list generated from a committtee ?

While I can appreciate that support of a local community is important, your list is missing a few prominent names including the most important one: Ghery (and the building that started last decades museum craze). If all institutions go local or national, we as American architects lose a great deal of opportunity as well. The Louvre, Bilbao, National Gallery in London, Ara Pacis Museum Rome just to name a tiny fraction of the major work done in world capitals by American architects. To have buildings by HdM, Piano and soon Snohetta raise the bar for us practicing here.

Snohetta came to prominence as a young team entering an international design competition against the big names of the day. I don’t see anything stopping our colleagues from doing the same today.

Why is it then that SFMOMA, along with other U.S. art museums lately, have formed a building committee, chosen from a very short list of “name” architects and then picked the most buzz worthy and expensive architectural firms ?

With so much architectural talent and excellence going begging in the United States,and in particular California and given the unemployment rate among U.S. architects hovering at between 10% to 40% in the U.S. (depending on the city) why is it necessary to hire a firm from Norway?

Isn’t hiring an architect when they have several museum commissions a bit late in the game and at the top of the market? If every city has their Adjaye/Zumthor/Koolhaas/Snøhetta/Piano building won’t it be difficult to claim uniqueness from any other institution?

A cultural consumer is already hard pressed to differentiate one museum from another given how many are done by a mere handful of well know architects. From a marketing standpoint this is unsustainable. From an architectural standpoint it is a tragedy.

This building project, if it proceeds as planned, will stand as a monument to the current media obsessed age which is ignoring a generation of new, qualified, diverse, and excellent, U.S. architects. Lost is support and nurture of an organic and vital architectural scene in the long term in the attempt to generate buzz in the short term.

One looks to the boards of any city’s art institutions to be the patrons of all the creative arts each time they have the opportunity. It is dismaying that the boards of art institutions in U.S. cities do not support their own architects and include them in the creation of cultural buildings.

I hope there are water slides in the ‘new’ museum. I hope there are secret passages to weird rooms in the ‘new’ museum. I hope there is a section deep underground, like a grotto or a bunker, where the sex lives of the artists in the ‘new’ SFMOMA are revealed.