From the street, Mario Botta’s 15-year-old San Francisco Museum of Modern Art looks like a string of shops: a capacious gift store, filled with trinkets, next to a movie theater, with a stripey stone façade and the ticket window right there on the sidewalk, next to a commodious café, complete with both indoor and outdoor seating. It’s perfect for the city, which is full of souvenir shops and coffee joints anyway. Did any other museum manage to be so emblematically postmodern?
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