The de Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco - Herzog & deMeuron Architects

The 2001 Pritzker Prize winning Swiss firm of Herzog & deMeuron are responsible for a controversial new building to house the collections of the de Young Museum, one of 2 museums owned and operated by the City of San Francisco. Mr. Sellars was the lead Telecommunications and Audiovisual systems designer for this project. The building is extensively provisioned with both wired and wireless connectivity for the many multi-media systems in the building. The De Young has one of the largest databases of high resolution digitized art, comprising 85,000 images at about 10.0GB each. Each piece of art work in the building will essentially have its own web-site, so that visitors will be able to interact with the databases that support the art-works, with related photo’s, commentary, historical and social context and interviews with art historians and in some cases with the artist (if still living). Installing wiring and wireless access was a challenge due to the strong monolithic, modernist aesthetic of the Architects.