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The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency provided the Jesse Street Pacific Gas and Electric (PG and E) Building to the Contemporary Jewish Museum in 1994. Four years later, the Museum picked the Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind (b. 1946) to design a new gallery space to appended to the PG and E substation. Design work for the Contemporary Jewish Museum began in 1998. Like many museums designe since Frank Gehry's creation of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, (1997), the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco sought a spectacular, highly sculptural facility to attract tourists. It wrote of its building in 2011: "Unveiled in 2005, Libeskind's design combines the history of an early 20th-century San Francisco landmark building with the dynamism of contemporary architecture. The 63,000 square foot facility marries many of the character-defining features of the original substation with bold contemporary spaces, emanating a powerful connection between tradition and innovation and reflects the Museum's mission to celebrate Jewish culture, history, art, and ideas within the context of 21st-century perspectives. The building embodies a number of symbolic references to Jewish concepts. Most notably, Libeskind was inspired by the Hebrew phrase "L'Chaim" [To Life], because of its connection to the role the substation played in restoring energy to the city after the 1906 earthquake and the Museum's mission to be a lively center for engaging audiences with Jewish culture." (See The Contemporary Jewish Museum, "The Building,"Accessed 06/28/2011.) The building possessed the formal vocabulary of sharply tilted and broken crystalline shapes that Libeskind explored in other museum buildings, most notably at the Denver Art Museum (which opened on 10/06/2006). Spaces of the interior were designed to be bewildering and destabilizing. The Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco opened on Sunday, 06/08/2008.

PCAD id: 2120