The Broad Museum might not be the only new museum to be built in Downtown Los Angeles. Announced last year, L.A. property developer Tom Gilmore and Tom Wiscombe seem to be making progress towards the Old Bank District Museum, a new contemporary art and design museum that will house the works of locally based artists. Located in the Old Bank District, the OBDM will interweave through three interconnected buildings along Main and Fourth Streets: the Bank House Garage, the Farmers and Merchants Bank, and the Hellman Building.
According to previous reports, Gilmore and his business partner Jerri Perrone will fund the initial construction, and start construction documents by this year. Completion of the project is currently slated for 2017.
Read on for more project info we received from Tom Wiscombe:
"The OBDM is a contemporary art and design 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."
"The project is located beneath, inside of, and on top of the Farmer’s & Merchant’s 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 or forgotten spaces. It is an unorthodox museum form, in the sense that it withdraws from iconicity and creates a world within a world."
"A sequence of discrete objects draws visitors through the space. Objects penetrate through floors, peek over rooftops, and inhabit dark interior voids. The main 45,000 SF. exhibition space is located in basement and sub-basement spaces that include turn-of-the-century bank vaults that become part of the ensemble."
"On the roof of the Bankhouse Garage is a 35,000 SF. Sculpture Garden with a Café and Amphitheater, creating a new ground in the city. Unlike generalizing forms of coherence we have become familiar with in this late period of digital architecture, such as smoothness and continuity, this project is based on a new, non-literal form of coherence produced by the uniqueness of specific objects and the vicarious relations between them."
Project details:
Client: Tom Gilmore and Jerri Perrone, Gilmore Associates
Type: Private Los Angeles Art and Design Museum
Floor Area: 80,000 SF
Architect: Tom Wiscombe Architecture
Structural: Greg Otto, Walter P Moore
11 Comments
intentionally ugly.
Installation by cargo helicopter is a nice touch...
I wouldn't have described the project as an ensemble of objects because then it takes away from their description of the project as trying not to be an icon. Now you can argue instead of making one big icon, they made several. The project knows it should be a weaving landscape but can't help itself. The project is quite heavy handed, but it would be cool to see it built nonetheless.
Not a big fan of "crumpled paper architecture"
looks like ass
Reminds me a bit of an early Coop Himmelblau project and a project from a prof back in undergrad called prasite. So are the graphics on the shell going to be "graphics" or "materials"?
^Some really nice thoughtful commentary above, all. Good job. Doctor, go do it, Matty, take the rest of the day off, team.
enrique morias market in barcelona has similar concept for the "roof scape". its surrounded by taller residential buildings though...
Fred, its your job to provide commentary (i mean blah blah), right? Then go do it, and leave us to our puerile humor!
I loved these designs in 2003! Its what I thought the future would look like. In hindsight, of course Its like looking at hairstyles in highschool yearbooks... I am curious what he's done recently, Im sure its worlds away.
Where are all the fanboys defending materialist philosophy and flat ontologies?
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