A design team led by interdisciplinary, New York City-based architecture and landscape firm Weiss/Manfredi has been selected to reinterpret the La Brea Tar Pits and George C. Page Museum building in Los Angeles. 

The design team includes experiential designers Imaginary Forces, horticulturist and water conservation experts Perry and Associates Collaborative, paleobotanist Carole Gee, artist Mark Dion, and Michael Bierut of Pentagram. Locally, the team will draw on the expertise of Brenda Levin of Levin & Associates for architectural and historic preservation assistance, among others that have yet to be announced. 

Upgrading and Expanding the Museum and Site

The project seeks to repurpose, upgrade, and expand the 1970s-era George C. Page Museum building, a partially submerged paleontological and educational complex designed by Los Angeles architects Willis Fagan and Frank Thornton. In addition, the park's 13-acre site will also be redesigned by the team. 

Though the designers have yet to undertake an extensive "multi-year" community outreach and engagement process, a few elements of the design stand out. For one, unlike other proposals, the selected scheme will keep the existing museum building while adding a new extension behind the existing building over what is currently a parking lot. Also, the park's iconic plaster mammoths, which sit partially submerged in an artificial tar pit fronting Wilshire Boulevard, are to be kept in place. 

The designers will overhaul the park grounds, adding a series of new figure eight-shaped walking paths at the front of the museum while also expanding the footprint of the artificial lake significantly. Other site improvements will bring additional park spaces, tree groves, and curving walking paths to the park. 

In a press release announcing their selection, Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, principals at WEISS/MANFREDI, write, “There is truly no place in the world as magical as La Brea Tar Pits. We and our team are deeply honored and grateful for this once-in-a lifetime opportunity to reveal the multiple identities of the Tar Pits, the Museum, and Hancock Park." 

"Our ‘Loops and Lenses’ concept creates new connections between the museum and the Park, between science and culture, and envisions the entire site as an unfolding place of discovery. We are thrilled to begin work with Dr. Bettison-Varga and NHMLAC to rejuvenate the Tar Pits and the Museum and carry them into the future and into the public imagination.”

The Weiss/Manfredi-led team beats out competing proposals from Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Danish architects Dorte Mandrup. 

What's Next?

According to a report in The Los Angeles Times, the project team will spend a year master planning the site in order to develop a comprehensive conceptual design for the project. After that, fundraising for project will begin. 

Dr. Lori Bettison-Varga, President and Director of the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles, the organization that runs the Page Museum, tells Carolina Miranda of The Los Angeles Times, that the slow and steady timeframe for the project moving forward "will allow us, after the intensity of the competition, to quietly work with the museum and museum staff and interested stakeholders. It will be quiet listening and fact gathering and we’ll start testing out variations on the ideas that we presented.”