Escalators were relocated to the north side, stacked along the facade where the 1946 extension had once stood. Indoors, Piano stripped the building (which had undergone piecemeal renovations over the years) down to the basics: its concrete floor plates and the board-formed concrete columns. The exterior now truly sparkles in the afternoon light. They then got to work restoring the exterior architectural elements, repairing hundreds of the Cordova Shell limestone panels and restoring the golden cylindrical volume - work that was carried out by restoration architect John Fidler. building, now reborn as the Saban Building, is back from the brink with an architectural makeover that has left it looking sleek and updated - to the point that LACMA may deeply regret that it let the building slip from its grasp.įor starters, the architects removed an extension that had been added to the north side in 1946, bringing the structure back to its 1930s form. If there were throwdowns, you can’t tell by looking at the place, because the Academy Museum delivers the goods. The global firm Gensler later came on board as executive architect, and the project was helmed, on its end by Richard Stoner and David Pakshong. But he left in 2014 amid rumors of tension with Piano - though his name remains in the credits as contributing to the museum’s concept design. In the early years, Zoltan Pali of Studio Pali Fekete Architects (who stylishly transformed the Beverly Hills Post Office into the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in 2013), was also involved. site instead, with Piano as the architect. That plan also fell victim to the 2008 recession, and by 2012, the Academy had settled on the May Co. Originally, the Academy had hoped to place its museum on Sunset Boulevard near the 101 freeway, in a building designed by French architect Christian de Portzamparc. Naturally, it took a winding path to get here. The completed project - which comes as LACMA is still trying to excavate foundations for its new building - feels like the dramatic denouement in a starchitectural poker movie: I’ll see your biomorphic blob and raise you a Death Star! The design even includes a piazza on the north side of the building. His design for the Academy Museum completes the circulation routes he originally proposed to LACMA almost two decades ago. building as part of a long-term lease arrangement with LACMA, and Piano was back in command of the unfinished western edge of the complex. “There’s this small European piazzettas style,” he told me in 2013, “which I think is ridiculous for Los Angeles.”īut in 2012 the Academy of Motion Pictures took over the May Co. Zumthor, in an early interview, expressed skepticism for Piano’s master plan. But the 2008 market crash put an end to renovation plans, with Piano’s master plan only partially implemented.Ī year later, LACMA director Michael Govan began courting Peter Zumthor to redesign the eastern campus, and work around the May Co. building to create space for additional galleries and a suite of offices, as well as a research center. Coming soon to the neighborhood: Swiss architect Peter Zumthor’s monolith museum building for LACMA, which will bridge Wilshire.Īt this intersection of look-at-me design, Piano’s building seems to emerge as if it’s a giant eyeball to look out at you.Īt the time, LACMA’s intention was to one day renovate the May Co. It’s a formidable design feat considering the building’s location at the architecturally cluttered corner of Wilshire and Fairfax, which currently harbors the Googie coffee shop-turned-filming location Johnie’s and the flaming spaghetti forms of Kohn Pedersen Fox’s Petersen Automotive Museum. You can see it peering at you from the second story of gallery 1301PE. Even if you leave the LACMA-Academy Museum complex to visit the independent art galleries a block west at 6150 Wilshire, well, the Death Star will follow you there too. Its circular form is visible from the ramps of LACMA’s Pavilion for Japanese Art and over the sawtooth roof of the Resnick. The Geffen Theater - known colloquially as “the Death Star” - is absolutely inescapable. This is no run-of-the-mill renovation and expansion. In combination with the brash new Geffen Theater, the architect has remade the western edge of a blocks-long cultural complex that also includes the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum, as well as LACMA where he designed two other buildings: the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and the Resnick Pavilion. But the team at Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Piano’s namesake architectural studio, has given this handsome structure new life. shuttered the store in the 1990s, the building languished.
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