SAN FRANCISCO (CN) - "Just walk around and find what speaks to you."
Though given sincerely, the advice Saturday might have felt flippant stacked against the long queue of people awaiting their turn at the information booth during the first week of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's much-anticipated reopening.
It proved useful armor, however, against the urge to run around from famous work to famous work, like a tourist trying to get in all the sites in a day.
In addition to setting the tone for a slower course, the advice prioritized the personal journey over the critical consensus.
Perhaps modern art's reputation as angst-ridden and willfully incomprehensible precedes it. Perhaps because art museums prove breeding grounds for individuals in designer eyewear standing around saying patently pretentious things, people tend not to think of these museums as necessarily fun.
But the newly renovated and finally reopened SFMOMA challenges this notion.
There is a simplicity in just walking around and finding things that speak to you.
It also reveals what places such as the SFMOMA are supposed to be. Not arenas for intellectual show-offs. Not proving grounds for the initiated, or classroom crucibles. Rather they are playgrounds. Places to have fun.
The comprehensive renovation process precipitating this month's reopening shut down the West Coast's most iconic modern art museum for three years.
Norwegian architectural firm Snohetta led the 235,000-square-foot expansion, which entailed appropriating one of the city's historic firehouses and doubling the amount of space available for art presentation, while offering about six times as much public space as the previous.
A large-scale vertical garden wall new to the museum is also now the city's largest.
"The space feels the same as it used to, but it's gotten better," said Gabriella Giuliani, an SFMOMA worker who was also on staff 10 years ago. "I think the theme of the museum is boundaryless, and it works because you start at the base and you just expand outwards."
The architects said they wanted to preserve SFMOMA's straightforward feel and gridlike layout on the first couple of floors, while building both up and out from it as the seven-story building ascends.
Though meant to encourage a sense of meandering — allowing museumgoers to flow from room to room, floor to floor and exhibit to exhibit — some found the layout disorienting.
"It was greatly expanded, but I found it very confusing," Manuel Eruiti said. "It was too hard to find the stairs."
Others seemed to enjoy the building's purposeful, at-times bewildering oddities, similar to the deceptive grid of San Francisco's own streets.
"The visitor should sense that the building is inspired by one of the great cities of the world, San Francisco," said Craig Dykers, founding partner of Snohetta.
Cameron Woodward, a member of the museum who lives in Oakland, said the expansion facilitates access to the entire collection.
"To me, it's not so much the individual works, but the collection as a whole and watching culture shift as you make your way through it," Woodward said.