Follow the Fissure to the New De Young: Andy Goldsworthy Will Lead the Way

Follow the Fissure to the New De Young Andy Goldsworthy Will Lead the Way
Andy Goldsworthy knelt in the copper-clad courtyard of the new de Young Museum the other day, a steel mallet in one hand, a slab of blue-gray stone in the other. Tilting the tablet on a pile of sand, he whacked it with measured strokes till the stone split cleanly in two along a snaking fracture.

"I'm trying to find the right blow that will produce the crack," said Goldsworthy, the British sculptor known for the wondrous open-air works he makes with natural materials found on the spot. He's spent the past few weeks in San Francisco painstakingly breaking and piecing together sandstone pavers to form a winding fissure that "should feel as if it comes from within the stone, rather than externally."

Commissioned for the opening of the de Young on Oct. 15, Goldsworthy's "Faultline" is a drawing in stone, a quake-city creation that will draw visitors into the new museum along a meandering crack running from the roadway out front through a series of cleaved boulders you can sit on.

It's a simple idea, "but so complicated to achieve a crack that appears effortless in this space," said Goldsworthy, 49, a lean, soft-spoken man with large reserves of patience and energy. "To get this line flowing and joining it together is incredibly difficult. There's so much effort gone into making it effortless."

Goldsworthy, an a