Tucked against the mountain at 101 North Museum Drive, the Palm Springs Art Museum has been a visual and performing arts institution since 1938, when it opened as the Palm Springs Desert Museum. It opened as a modest natural science and Native American art collection and grew into the institution the Coachella Valley now builds its cultural calendar around. Since 2004 the museum has focused on design and contemporary art, a turn that simply made official what the town already was.
It runs an Architecture and Design Center in Palm Springs and the Faye Sarkowsky Sculpture Garden at a satellite location in Palm Desert, so the institution reaches across the valley rather than sitting in a single building. The structure in front of you was designed by E. Stewart Williams, an architect whose name attaches to a remarkable share of what people come here to photograph. Its stone walls are quarried to match the mountain immediately behind it, so the museum reads less as an object dropped onto the site than as a piece of the slope squared off.
The wall in front of you is quarried from the same rock as the slope it leans into.