Randall Museum gets a subtle but worthwhile upgrade.
Venerable S.F. education resource gets a worthy upgrade
The joy of an architectural sleight-of-hand like the renovation of San Francisco’s Randall Museum is that many visitors won’t realize anything has changed.
Toddlers accompanied by their parents are happy to gape at seminatural displays like the five California quail who live in a long, three-tiered display case. The students on field trips who file down one ramp to explore playful displays on earthquakes and ocean life, and then file back up another, don’t care that this loop didn’t exist before the 67year-old facility reopened in February.
But such moments are a key aspect of how civic architecture should be judged. They help a public building to serve its intended public — an accomplishment that, in turn, enriches the community as a whole.
This is especially true with buildings that date back to the years after World War II, when growing cities had the resources to invest in civic structures that remain vitally important, even if they no longer function particularly well.
That certainly was the case with the Randall Museum, a familyfriendly outpost in Corona Heights above the Castro. The streamlined masonry structure designed by William Merchant opened in 1951, a tribute to the determination of longtime recreation superintendent Josephine Randall to create a place for children “that would foster a love of science, natural history and the arts.”
That mission endures, though the buildings and grounds have evolved. A car drop-off in front was replaced years ago by a native-