The Main Museum of Los Angeles Art is a non-profit contemporary art museum located in the heart of the Old Bank District of Downtown Los Angeles. The project is part adaptive re-use and part new construction, capitalizing on the tension between historical and contemporary architecture. It is devoted to engaging the public with the most important ideas of our time through the art of Los Angeles.

The project is located beneath, inside of, and on top of the historical Farmers & Merchants Bank, the Hellman Building, and the Bankhouse Garage at 4th and Main Street. The museum is a three-dimensional space that weaves through these buildings, inhabiting their hidden recesses and forgotten spaces. It is an unorthodox museum form, in the sense that it withdraws from iconicity and creates a world within a world. In this museum, art is embedded deep into the space and life of the city, rather than preserved and presented in an exclusive environment.

A sequence of architectural objects draws visitors through the space. Objects penetrate through floors, peek over rooftops, and inhabit dark interior voids. This produces a set of discrete experiences rather than a spatial continuum. Objects are primarily black or mirror chrome, creating a sense of mystery and inaccessibility, also allowing visitors to focus on the exhibitions. The main 40,000 SF Main Exhibition space is located in vast basement and sub-basement spaces that include turn-of-the-century bank vaults and other historical features. These will become part of the ensemble of objects. 

At Ground Level, The Museum interfaces with the Street on both Main Street and 4th Street. The main entry is on 4th Street, through the historical, vaulted Hellman building foyer. The iconic Farmer’s and Merchant’s Bank becomes a multi-level museum restaurant and lounge, with views of art galleries revealed through holes in the floor and glazed galleries on elevated mezzanines. The renovated historic glass barrel roof, covered since World War II, is renovated to its original turn-of-the-century grandeur. Finally, a mysterious nested object floats above the restaurant, housing both new media art and special events.

The rooftop of the Bankhouse Garage is transformed into a 35,000 SF public Sculpture Garden, including a Promenade, Cafe, Amphitheater, and water features. Visitors can access this space from Main Street, 4th Street, or Spring Street. The Multimedia Art Wall facing Spring Street contains stairways connecting the rooftop with Spring Street Park below. From the park, Lebbeus Woods’ Earthwave sculpture, the peak of the Amphitheater, and the glazed Community Arts Meeting Space will also be visible. 

From Main Street, a new facade and glimpses of the rooftop Cafe cantilevering outwards will draw attention from the street, while not fully revealing the form or extents of the project. Finally, the Sculpture Garden will be visible from the tallest buildings of Downtown Los Angeles, acting as the “fifth facade” of the project.

Unlike generalizing forms of coherence we have become familiar with in this late period of digital design, such as smoothness and continuity, this project is ultimately based on a new, non-literal form of coherence produced by the uniqueness of specific objects and the vicarious relations between them.