The museum's design is predicated upon four geometrically-defined ribbons that are the programmatic, technical, and formal catalysts for each of the building's four floors. These ribbons are both telling and promissory: individually and in concert with one another they define and connect the museum's spaces, thereby producing a series of laps, loops and layers. At the scale of the site, the ribbons also articulate the museum's relationship to the campus. On the ground floor, they escape the bar, forming overlapping landscapes of indoor and outdoor spaces: the corner café draws people in off the campus Paseo; gallery and lecture receptions spill from the lobby out to the courtyard terrace; benches, tables, trees and the café's ribbon bar create a zone of activity along the museum's front facade.

The building envelope is conceptualized in terms of material and geometric sympathy rather than opposition. The laminated glass ribbons are barely held in place by the building's taut, Cartesian facade. These geometries continually align and realign as they wind their way among programs, balconies, and materials. Their role is to choreograph unexpected syntheses of use, perception, and form. Opacity and transparency—the first as pre-cast concrete with glass aggregate and the second as glass—oscillate here in a perpetual dialogue.

The ribbons of the SJSU art museum bring forth an open figure, a geometric, material and formal system whose figural quality resonates with its open-endedness. Stemming not from resistance or opposition, but instead from a desire to exploit, the open figure is a prompt—a synthetic trigger for architecture's functional, aesthetic, and technical promise.