The first phase of a monumental-scale new addition within LA’s famed Hollywood Forever Cemetery has been revealed after a design from Lehrer Architects and Arquitectura y Diseño. 

The Gower Court Mausoleum stands five stories and 100 feet above the landmark tourist attraction’s iconic palm grove, offering the deceased space for some 22,500 crypts and the public panoramic views of the city and Hollywood Sign beyond as one of the only true "new landmarks" to come to Los Angeles in recent memory.

Along with its Brazilian quartzite stone-covered crypts, the honeycombed Mausoleum's interior includes more than 30,000 niches for urn storage. They are connected via a circuit of open-air breezeways. Concrete is the primary building material, and the scale of the edifice was broken down thanks to a "vertical topographical landscape" incorporated by the inclusion of stepped garden setbacks that extend 20 feet away from its facade.

He was working with his former colleague Robert Sheinberg, the former Principal-in-Charge who left the firm to found Arquitectura y Diseño (or AyD) in 2021. Lehrer Architects has been working closely with Hollywood Forever since 2013, when it was first conceived as a project that would help extend the cemetery's service life by another fifty years.

Studio-MLA’s landscape contribution completes the design beginning at the ground level, serving visitors with a lush "reminder of the enduring and the ephemeral" that forms vertically until culminating at the roof garden and promenade beset by the granite block Columbarium and Information Center. 

Phase 1, which includes 5,000 crypts and 8,000 niches was completed over 4.5 years. Phase 2 will begin construction in the spring of 2025, adding a further 6,500 crypts and another 10,000 niches. Phase 3 will follow with 10,000 more crypts and 12,000 niches to complete the 400-foot-long, 160,000-square-foot structure.