SFMOMA, Part 28: Floor 3, Sculpture Terrace.
On Floor 3, outside the galleries, there is a wall with 19,442 plants in it, and it is alive.
Not decorated — alive. The living wall on the Pat and Bill Wilson Sculpture Terrace is a vertical garden rising alongside the museum's Snøhetta expansion: 150 feet long, nearly 30 feet tall, planted for this exact fog, this exact wind, this exact slant of light off Third Street. Designed by David Brenner of Habitat Horticulture, it is visible from multiple floors — a green cliff face in the middle of downtown San Francisco, growing. People come out for the Sightglass coffee and stay for the wall. It does not look like art. It is doing something art usually only promises: changing while you watch.
The living wall grows on the Floor 3 Sculpture Terrace (the Pat and Bill Wilson Sculpture Terrace) at SFMOMA, free to visit with admission. Designed by David Brenner of Habitat Horticulture, the vertical garden holds 19,442 plants across 37 species — 21 of them native to California and the Bay Area — the largest public living wall in the country.
The easy reading is that this is landscaping — very good landscaping, the museum's green credential, a nice backdrop for selfies. And it is a nice backdrop. But the subject is sharper than that. The living wall is the building's argument about what a museum is for. SFMOMA's expansion added 170,000 square feet of gallery space for 32,000 works of modern and contemporary art — and then it gave one of its most prominent surfaces, a full vertical face of the new building, to something that is not art at all. No artist's name. No wall text. Just plants, doing what plants do, on a schedule no curator controls. In an institution devoted to human making, the living wall is the one exhibit authored by no one.
2016: The green cliff
The wall was part of the Snøhetta expansion that reopened SFMOMA in 2016 — the Norwegian firm's white, rippled facade that remade the museum's presence on Third Street. Snøhetta didn't want a rigid geometric garden. The brief to Brenner was to capture the feel of an understory plant community on Mount Tamalpais: monochromatic greens, ferns and baby tears and huckleberry and pink flowering currant, textures your eyes get lost in. He mapped the site's shade patterns by computer — the wall sits in a sliver between a parking structure and the museum — then laid out the planting like a paint-by-numbers chart that, by his own account, looked like a Pollock splatter. Each plant went in by hand.
Then came the harder problem: water. San Francisco is perpetually water-starved, so Brenner worked with the Oakland engineering firm Hyphae to build the wall its own life-support system — a basement room of tanks and sensors that irrigates ten separate zones, tracks moisture, adjusts pH and fertilizer automatically, and runs on storm water collected from the building plus condensate from the HVAC system. Excess drains back to the tank. Nothing is wasted. In a building where the art is climate-controlled to within a degree, the living wall is the one surface allowed to have weather. On a foggy morning it drips. In September it goes a little brown at the edges. It is the museum's only exhibit that can die, and that fact — held in the middle of all that concrete and curation — is quietly radical.
There is also the orientation trick. The wall is visible from the galleries on multiple floors, which means it functions as a constant in the museum's visual field — the thing you see between exhibitions, the green interval. Museum fatigue is real: after two hours of looking at art, the eye stops seeing. The living wall is the palate cleanser built into the architecture. You look at the Calder mobiles turning inside, and then you look out at thousands of plants turning sunlight into sugar, and the two systems rhyme. Both move without being pushed. Both run on air and light.
The terrace, again
Back on Floor 3, back outside. The Sculpture Terrace pairs the living wall with the other thing Floor 3 does best: pause. There is Sightglass coffee, there are benches, there is the city beyond. Inside, Oldenburg's apple core performs decay in fiberglass and paint; outside, the wall does it for real — shedding, browning, regrowing on a cycle no fabrication schedule can match.
Go stand in front of it and try to count. You will not get through them all. Nobody has. The number is the point: too many to see individually, which forces you to see them as a system — a green field, a texture, a single living thing made of thousands. That is also how the best art works, and the wall knows it. It is not in the collection. It does not need to be. It is the museum breathing. 🌁
Timeline — the wall
2016 — SFMOMA's Snøhetta expansion opens; the living wall is planted on the new terrace
2016 — David Brenner of Habitat Horticulture completes the vertical garden: 19,442 plants across 37 species, 21 of them California natives
Today — growing on the Pat and Bill Wilson Sculpture Terrace, Floor 3, visible from multiple floors, 151 Third Street