CMG collaborated with Jensen Architects on this winning scheme for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture garden design competition. Located on the roof of the parking garage adjoining the museum, the scheme features a bridge from the museum to the garden, a panoramic overlook from the fifth floor gallery, a pavilion, and lichen-covered walls that frame the rooftop gallery.

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A colony of lichen covers the surface of the garden walls. Lichen are an essential link between San Francisco's mineral environment and California's complex ecological systems. As a sort of "pre-garden", it is a symbiotic relationship between algae and fungus, which convert bare rock to soil and are the beginning of ecological succession. More than 1200 species of lichen in CA remain absent from the surfaces of our downtown due to air quality and the continuous renewal of surfaces. By planting a lichen garden downtown we declare a bullish position on improving air quality and investing in stasis. While providing a unique ecology, the slow-growing lichen also allow visitors a new sense of time and patience in observing this temporal garden.

The sculpture garden is an integral part of the gallery sequence and an extension of the museum. By removing the back wall of the museum’s top floor, its contents and visitors to flow out into the garden. Views of the garden unfold from the raised vantage point of the new Fifth Floor Garden Overlook. Cantilevered over the garden, the visitor is both suspended above and within the garden while remaining inside. Visitors access the garden from a Bridge which is clipped to the side of the Museums exterior wall, hovering 5 stories above street level.  The bridge is a space of transition. Moving down-and-over  The Pavilion is a spacious and light structure that allows the Garden to slide through uninterrupted.