![]() “There’s this small European piazzettas style,” he told me in 2013, “which I think is ridiculous for Los Angeles.”īut in 2012 the Academy of Motion Pictures took over the May Co. ![]() ![]() Zumthor, in an early interview, expressed skepticism for Piano’s master plan. But the 2008 market crash put an end to renovation plans, with Piano’s master plan only partially implemented.Ī year later, LACMA director Michael Govan began courting Peter Zumthor to redesign the eastern campus, and work around the May Co. building to create space for additional galleries and a suite of offices, as well as a research center. Coming soon to the neighborhood: Swiss architect Peter Zumthor’s monolith museum building for LACMA, which will bridge Wilshire.Īt this intersection of look-at-me design, Piano’s building seems to emerge as if it’s a giant eyeball to look out at you.Īt the time, LACMA’s intention was to one day renovate the May Co. It’s a formidable design feat considering the building’s location at the architecturally cluttered corner of Wilshire and Fairfax, which currently harbors the Googie coffee shop-turned-filming location Johnie’s and the flaming spaghetti forms of Kohn Pedersen Fox’s Petersen Automotive Museum. You can see it peering at you from the second story of gallery 1301PE. Even if you leave the LACMA-Academy Museum complex to visit the independent art galleries a block west at 6150 Wilshire, well, the Death Star will follow you there too. Its circular form is visible from the ramps of LACMA’s Pavilion for Japanese Art and over the sawtooth roof of the Resnick. The Geffen Theater - known colloquially as “the Death Star” - is absolutely inescapable. This is no run-of-the-mill renovation and expansion. In combination with the brash new Geffen Theater, the architect has remade the western edge of a blocks-long cultural complex that also includes the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum, as well as LACMA where he designed two other buildings: the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and the Resnick Pavilion. But the team at Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Piano’s namesake architectural studio, has given this handsome structure new life. shuttered the store in the 1990s, the building languished.
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