San Francisco Art, Architecture & Culture: the back story

About San Francisco Art, Architecture & Culture: the back story

By the ULTIMATE San Francisco Editorial Team

San Francisco packs a remarkable amount of art into seven by seven miles. Within a day you can stand under the oculus at SFMOMA, climb the copper tower of the de Young in Golden Gate Park, study Depression-era frescoes at the foot of Coit Tower and walk the painted alleys of the Mission. Here is the story behind the city’s great cultural buildings, and how to see them well.

SFMOMA and SoMa

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art chose its Third Street site in 1988 and asked the Swiss architect Mario Botta to design it. His striped brick building, with its great cylindrical skylight, opened in 1995, replacing the museum’s first home in the Veterans Building on Van Ness Avenue, and turned South of Market into the city’s museum quarter.

Twenty-one years later the museum doubled down. Snøhetta added a ten-storey, 235,000-square-foot extension along the back of the Botta building, and the expanded SFMOMA opened on 14 May 2016 with nearly three times its former gallery space. Its eastern façade is clad in more than 700 panels flecked with silicate crystals from Monterey County, so the building changes colour with the light. Inside, a new suspended stair lets daylight from the oculus fall through the atrium.

San Francisco hangs its art in museums, on the walls of its alleys and in the fog itself.

Across Third Street, the Museum of the African Diaspora shows contemporary art and culture of the African diaspora, and Yerba Buena Gardens gives you lawns, a waterfall and public art between visits. Plan on a full morning here, with lunch in SoMa.

The de Young in Golden Gate Park

The de Young closed on 31 December 2000 for a complete rebuild by Herzog & de Meuron, and its new building opened in October 2005. The copper façade is perforated and textured with thousands of dots in different sizes, an abstraction of sunlight falling through the trees of Golden Gate Park, and it will slowly weather to green. Take the lift to the ninth floor of the Hamon Observation Tower for 360-degree views over the city and out to the Pacific.

Across the Music Concourse stands the California Academy of Sciences under its living roof, and the Japanese Tea Garden is a few steps away. Together they make Golden Gate Park one of the great museum gardens of America: walk between them rather than driving.

The de Young’s sister museum, the Legion of Honor, stands on the cliffs of Lincoln Park at Land’s End. Alma de Bretteville Spreckels first saw a replica of the Palais de la Légion d’Honneur at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition and persuaded her husband, Adolph, to build a permanent version. It opened on Armistice Day, 11 November 1924, in memory of the Californians who died in the First World War. Rodin’s The Thinker has sat in its Court of Honor since the opening, and the collection holds more than 90 Rodin sculptures made during the artist’s lifetime. Come late in the afternoon, when the light over the Golden Gate turns gold.

Frescoes and murals

San Francisco has painted its walls for almost a century. Inside the base of Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill are 27 frescoes painted in 1934 by artists of the Public Works of Art Project, the forerunner of the WPA. Maxine Albro, Lucien Labaudt, Ralph Stackpole, John Langley Howard and their colleagues pictured Depression-era California at work and at leisure, and the city’s Arts Commission still cares for them.

In the Mission, the community arts non-profit Precita Eyes has painted the neighbourhood since 1977 and leads public mural walks through its streets and alleys. Join a tour rather than wandering alone: the guides know who painted what, and why.

Gardens in the sky

Downtown, the newest landmark is a park. Salesforce Park covers 5.4 acres on the roof of the Salesforce Transit Center, seventy feet above its Grand Hall, and runs the whole nearly four-block length of the building, with a half-mile loop path among the towers. At the other end of the city, the Palace of Fine Arts, built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, still reflects its rotunda in the Marina lagoon. And on Van Ness Avenue stands the War Memorial Opera House, designed by Arthur Brown Jr., the architect of City Hall, as a memorial to the San Franciscans who served in the First World War. It opened on 15 October 1932 with Puccini’s Tosca, hosted the drafting of the United Nations Charter in 1945, and is home today to San Francisco Opera and San Francisco Ballet.

What’s new (checked October 2026)

On 18 April 2026 SFMOMA unveiled Reimagined: The Fisher Collection at 10, a fresh installation of the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection across floors three to six, about 60,000 square feet of galleries. In September 2026 the museum also launched a reimagined department of Media, Technology and Culture, with a new head and curators appointed.

Cultural calendar

FOG Design+Art, the city’s design and art fair, takes over Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, Piers 2 and 3, from 21 to 24 January 2027. In December, San Francisco Ballet’s Nutcracker returns to the War Memorial Opera House. For exhibitions and performances, check each venue’s own programme before you go.

How to see it

Our advice: give SoMa a morning, Golden Gate Park an afternoon, and keep an evening for the Opera House or a play at A.C.T. on Geary Street. Walk up to Coit Tower from Washington Square for the frescoes and the view, and end the day on the Castro Theatre’s neon-lit block. Book museums and performances direct with each venue, and see our Arts & Culture page for every museum, stage and cinema we recommend.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with San Francisco Art, Architecture & Culture: the back story before you go.