Italian architect Renzo Piano, Los Angeles architect Zoltan Pali and officials from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences unveiled preliminary designs Thursday for a $300-million film museum at Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue.
The architectural centerpiece of the 290,000-square-foot complex, just west of the campus of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, would be a giant glass-enclosed dome, which Piano refers to as the "sphere" and the "soap bubble."
— latimes.com
6 Comments
I suppose the dome shape is better than a building shaped like the Oscar statuette... but not much better. The whole LACMA site is such a mess, though (excepting the old May Co.), why not plop down another big object?
Generic Piano design collides with historic structure/sun sphere.
RPBW seems to underwhelm specifically in LA which is very strange. The new cultural projects in Chicago and SF are really quite nice. Why cant they do LA right? Here we have a bubble that encloses a theatre that is not bubble shaped, so to resolve that they include some sort of indoor biosphere. Why? I dont believe that a shaded roof structure could not be even more beautiful and pleasant to be in. The over obsession with the sphere is too obvious here...
that rendering is drawn from 99 cent store across the street. i like the way it doesn't block the park behind.. it would be nice to see "renzo's chicken or the egg opera; the movie" in it someday.
why gripe about the inclusion of an indoor atrium/park? that's awesome.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, AMPAS as it is known here, has been stumbling to build a film museum since their Vine/Sunset debacle. They get a ton of money from the Oscar broadcast, which pays the operating expenses for the library, archives and staff. I dont think the AMPAS membership is going to go for this one after they got stung on the Vine Street project.
Besides LACMA has never been friendly to the film industry, mothballing the popular film programs, not ever giving curator status to the late Ron Haver who started LACMA's film programing, in general thumbing a nose at film makers and describing film as a second rate art. Snobbery. And Hollywood money has a long memory.
The LACMA scheme as described looks like another hodgepodge of styles. A toy chest of architectures related only by location. From the Bruce Goff Japanese Pavilion to the black box Mies bookstore to Hugh Hardy's disco streamlined moderne to Luckmans sorry start. Renzo Piano's 'back-to-the-future cinema spheres just continues the trajectory.
Maybe thats what LACMA is, just a jumble of donor dollar additions. Like that, LACMA is sardonically the cutting edge expression of the state of non-profits today, that is,the piecemeal vision of million dollar handouts. High-end Annie Hall.
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