The de Young Museum originated in the California Midwinter International Exposition of 1894, established as the Memorial Museum in the aftermath of the fair. Thirty years later, it was renamed for Michael H. de Young, the newspaper publisher who had organized the exposition and championed the museum's creation. The original Egyptian Revival building served for a century before structural concerns forced its replacement. Herzog & de Meuron's 2005 design wrapped the collection in a skin of perforated copper panels that catch the park's shifting light, the metal slowly greening as it weathers. Inside, the collection spans American art from the 17th century to the present, along with textile arts, African art, Oceanic art, and arts of the Americas.

Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, socialite and wife of sugar magnate Adolph Spreckels, was so taken by the French pavilion at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition that she commissioned a permanent replica on the cliffs above the Golden Gate. The Legion of Honor opened in 1924, its neoclassical columns and courtyard creating an improbable piece of Paris on a San Francisco hilltop. The museum houses European decorative arts, sculpture, and paintings from medieval to modern, along with one of the world's finest collections of works on paper. Its location -- surrounded by the cypress-lined fairways of Lincoln Park Golf Course, with views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Pacific -- may be the most dramatic museum setting in the United States.

The administrative union of the de Young and the Legion of Honor created a single institution with extraordinary breadth. Where the de Young focuses on American and non-European art, the Legion concentrates on European traditions. The combined collection allows visitors to move from Oceanic bark cloth to Rodin sculptures to contemporary California painting without leaving the same institution. The geographic separation -- nearly five miles between the two buildings -- means that visiting both requires commitment, but the contrast between settings is part of the experience. The de Young offers the enclosed world of Golden Gate Park, its gardens and music concourse. The Legion offers the exposed grandeur of the Pacific, the wind off the ocean, the sense of standing at the edge of the continent.