Not so fast: San Diego art museum could be blocked from selling its downtown home

The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego has closed its downtown San Diego galleries, which included the former baggage building at the historic Santa Fe Train Depot, shown here, and a second building that will soon become home to a Navy SEAL museum. A controversial plan revealed last week for the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego to sell its satellite offices and exhibition space at the historic Santa Fe railroad depot could get derailed. The city wouldn’t let the site go without an ironclad, long-term guarantee that, should the museum fail to uphold its end of the deal, San Diego has “an exclusive option to acquire title” for the property “at no cost.” MCASD spent more than $25 million refurbishing the site for museum purposes, making their commitment dear. Both the Copley and Jacobs structures were the work of Richard Gluckman, a fashionable New York designer known for a minimalist aesthetic and regarded as an “artists’ architect.” Gluckman also designed spaces for the Dia art center and numerous art galleries in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, as well as the Mori Art Museum atop a Tokyo high-rise, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M., and the Picasso Museum in Malaga, Spain.