Late last week, the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles revealed one rendering so far of the new Audrey Irmas Pavilion by OMA New York, who won the design competition for the building back in 2015. As an addition to the Temple's Erika J. Glazer Family Campus, the Pavilion is OMA's first commission from a religious institution and their first cultural building in California.
Designed by OMA Partner Shohei Shigematsu with Associate Jake Forster and Executive Architect Gruen Associates, the Pavilion was named after its lead donor Audrey Irmas, a longtime congregant who gave $30 million to the Wilshire Boulevard Temple after she auctioned off a Cy Twombly painting in November 2015.
Expected to break ground later this year, the slanted building will include a main event space, a smaller multi-purpose room, and a sunken garden. The three spaces are interlocked and stacked on top of each other to create vantage points and framed views.
“We wanted to focus on communicating the energy of gathering and exchange,” Shohei Shigematsu said in a statement. “The pavilion is an active gesture, shaped by respectful moves away from the surrounding historic buildings, reaching out onto Wilshire Boulevard to create a new presence. Within the building, a series of interconnected meeting spaces at multiple scales provide ultimate flexibility for assembly while maintaining visual connections that establish outdoor indoor porosity and moments of surprise encounters.”
The building is currently scheduled for a 2020 completion.
13 Comments
It looks like the new OMA building is afraid of the existing historic Temple. Context people - start over.
That's probably intentional, concept people! I think it's rather nice gives the old building some air...
Am I wrong to say the legacy building is rather contextual as it clearly sets itself away a little responding to the temple? also, the arch talk.. Probably that opening on the side frames the temple really well.
concept+context
Totally agree.
A wedge of cheese?
A child playing with Sketchup.
Yuck
hard to tell anything from one image, especially this one. OMA official policy on context is fuck context still? Or is that so 90's...
Shigematsu seems to like formal gestures more than the mothership. My guess is it will look better when built than this image indicates.
time to retire
The sketch makes me think of a petulant child screaming for attention. And that has nothing to do with context... just the need to be noticed. I am positive there is a view of the existing building from the west opening... is that how low the bar is to achieve a sensitive response to context?
Context... Now that's really funny... look who you are dealing with here.
Sorry Betty, you would be better off giving 100 monkeys typewriters and see if you get Shakespeare.
ps..
Doesn't history start with Corbu?
nothing worthwhile came before ... right?
If they can afford to build this it's time to remove the tax exemption from religious groups.
just because I like these kind of "this-looks-like-that" occurrences. academic practice Aptum Architecture's competition proposal:
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