View of the expansion from Yerba Buena, across Third Street.

Back in 1995, when SFMOMA opened its granite-and-brick building in San Francisco’s South of Market district, the museum was an early cultural presence in a transitioning industrial area. “We were pioneers in this neighborhood,” museum director Neal Benezra said at Wednesday’s groundbreaking ceremony for the much-anticipated expansion by Snøhetta. Back then, Mario Botta’s fortress of patterned brick worked well on a street where there was little else to connect to.

Eighteen years later, the museum has grown—with two or three times its original collection and programming, said Benezra—and the neighborhood along with it. South of Market is now the home of Twitter and a host of other tech companies, and with the Transbay Transit Center going up in its back yard, SFMOMA is not one to miss out on the neighborhood’s latest growth spurt. The expansion includes a 10-story tower in rippling lightweight concrete tucked behind the Botta building, along with new pedestrian entrances from alleyways and a 50-foot-tall green wall on a neighboring parking garage. When the building opens in early 2016, the museum will double its current exhibition capacity and add 41,000 square feet of unticketed public space.

After remarks from Benezra, board chair Charles Schwab, and Mayor Ed Lee, Snøhetta principal Craig Dykers took the stage. He described the expansion’s progress in an elaborate birthing metaphor, a process instigated by dozens of consultants engaged in architectural “polyamory.” Whatever the means, this new stepchild will make an extrovert out of the Botta building. “The museum, which was once introverted, will be open to passersby,” said Dykers. Whether the ensuing burst of silver confetti was meant to signal the beginning of labor—or some sort of giant collective archigasm—we’ll never be sure! Read more.

Photo © Drew Altizer Photography

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Left image via Vulture; right image via Curbed

Usually pop-ups are relegated to the tiny and the temporary, like Zaha’s pop-up hair salon or this hammam-turned-library in Bulgaria. But if the ambitious Hudson Yards development continues apace, come 2017 the city may bestow on itself one of its fanciest architectural toys yet: a 150-foot-tall giant glass box outfitted with a hideaway synthetic shell that can glide out and enclose a public plaza.

Like a modern-day Crystal Palace, the 170,000-square-foot Culture Shed—designed by Diller, Scofidio + Renfro and David Rockwell—will be an insta-venue that can house programming from all over the city, from Fashion Week to large-scale art installations to heretofore-unthinkable collaborations between the city’s artists, musicians, and performers.

“The Culture Shed encourages the city to shed those old definitions of culture,” Justin Davidson writes at Vulture. “It will operate the way the Forum did in Ancient Rome, as a neutral meeting ground where ideas can be incubated and influences exchanged.” Read more!

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Zaha Hadid at the opening of the Sterling Prize-Winning Maxxi in Rome, last year

Simply put, it was very much Zaha Hadid’s year, one which saw the realization of some of her most important projects. It also proved vindicating, with the completion and opening of the Guangzhou Opera House after the architect’s much publicized canceled-Cardiff Bay Opera House from 1995 and the long overdue recognition from her adopted homeland, with the openings of much hailed works such as the Evelyn Grace Academy in Brixton, the Riverside Museum in Glasgow, and the Olympic Aquatics Center in London. The year was also a turning point for Hadid’s work and firm, when the last of Zaha’s pre-digital projects, like last year’s MAXXI in Rome and the Evelyn Grace Academy, fully gave way to all-digital projects, such as the Aquatics Center, Guangzhou, and Riverside.

Emerging from a formalist generation weighed down by murky theory bastardized from Continental philosophy and coming of age in another under the influence of a resurgent Gauloises-smoking brand of nihilism, Zaha now commands a cultural influence, both populist in reach and aspirational in message, and an overwhelmingly large practice (with some 300 staff members from 55 countries) that are the envy of all ego-damaged architects. Nevermind that the buildings are exorbitantly expensive to build (poorly built, at that) and that all those sweeping, meaningless forms were ostensibly designed for the inevitable coffee table monograph rather than for real space. It’s Zaha’s world, and we’re just living in it. Here are the top ten Zaha posts of the year, plus a recent interview below.

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