Here are the sights of the Seattle Art Museum (version 3.0) all-nighter, full of Cinco de Mayo drunks, patrons, ravers, kids, and aesthetes alike.

When SAM 2.0 first opened downtown in 1991, the Robert Venturi-designed structure was a tribute to PoMo monumentalism. So what if it didn’t work as a public space or as an exhibition site. It was by a world-class architect, and little else mattered.

A decade later, Washington Mutual decided it wanted an office tower on the former Rhodes of Seattle department-store site, adjacent to and owned by SAM. The museum and the bank arrange for a bigger SAM as part of the project.

This time, they went to Portland and Seattle architects and designers. The new design befits Seattle’s legacy as a City of Engineers (and the status of director Mimi Gardner Gates, seen above, as Microsoft Bill’s stepmom). The new space is a lot less flashy and showy than the old space. It’s functional and organized. It’s built to exacting standards of crowd flow, presentation, and preservation. (The big exterior windows can be darkened in exacting degrees, to provide natural light without fading the paintings.)

The new space almost doubles SAM downtown’s exhibition space. Additional floors, which have been built for SAM but leased back to WaMu for now, could almost double it further.

The extra room allows for more art in more different, spacier, settings. Of particular note is the big, prominent area for modern and contemporary art, which helps make the whole place more current and more relevant to the hipoisie.

(Now, if they could address the common local-art-scene perception that SAM (heart)s Seattle collectors but cares less toward living Seattle artists.)

During the fund drive for the new SAM downtown and the Olympic Sculpture Park, SAM’s become Seattle’s wealthiest cultural institution. This time, they’ve spent this largesse wisely.