Upon entering Los Angeles’ new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, architecture fanatics may experience an unnerving moment of déjà vu. Past the northern side of the complex—comprising the renovated interior of the 1939 Saban Building (formerly known as the May Co. Wilshire department store) and an enormous domed addition at the rear—they will find themselves in an atrium ringed by catwalks and escalators, backed by a glass curtain wall, topped by an exposed ceiling, and flanked by a gift shop and café. Where have they seen this lean, high-tech aesthetic before?
Mais bien sûr, at the Centre Pompidou, the breakthrough 1977 project by the very architect headlining the design of the Academy Museum, Renzo Piano, Hon. FAIA, whose eponymous firm, the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, collaborated with architect of record Gensler on the latter project. Back in his Parisian days, Piano and then-partner Richard Rogers, Hon. FAIA, gave the world its first—and in some sense its last—real-world look at an architectural fantasy: a cultural and social space that could be reimagined and reconfigured at the whim of its users, with a sophisticated mechanical and circulatory apparatus. The Academy Museum lobby certainly emerges from a similar formula. It pushes the main exhibition spaces into the shell of the existing building and the main theater into the domed addition, liberating itself from most heavy-duty programming to become a malleable public space and an extension of its outdoor surroundings.
But this is where comparisons to Centre Pompidou end. The madcap design for Beaubourg that launched Piano onto the global scene 40-plus years ago was among the most polarizing projects of its day, admired by millions for its magpie ingenuity but lambasted by at least as many for its willful, ahistorical exoticism. In the decades since, Piano has moved by degrees into a far more quiescent mode of techno-positive modernism. No colorful ductwork bedecks the Academy Museum façade; no plastic tubes encase the escalators. Even “the Sphere,” as the globular addition has been termed, is as delicate as an orb of concrete and glass can possibly be. As befits his client’s mission, Piano’s latest project makes the excitement of his visionary early work palatable to a mass audience: avant-garde architecture with a Hollywood ending.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. The approximately 50,000-square-foot Academy Museum’s 13 million–item collection of movie memorabilia—including rare filmstock, costumes, props, and posters—is beautifully framed by the spare, clean-edged confines of Piano’s interior. More so than his other recent outings (ahem, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York), the sparseness of the Academy Museum design does not come at the expense of a strong sense of atmospherics. From the dimly lit first-floor film gallery to the defunct department store–restaurant-turned-top-floor conference room, and the red-on-red palette of the Sphere’s 1,000-seat David Geffen Theater, the project unfolds as a series of revelations, switching from dark to bright spaces, from the hardscape of the atrium to the plushness of the downstairs screening room. Treading under the shadow of the full-size mechanical Jaws shark dangling over the atrium and across the red-carpeted skyway to the Sphere, one would be hard-pressed not to feel a little starstruck.
The romanticism of Piano’s design is almost as remarkable as its modesty. Discretely hidden within the original department store, the museum leaves the prospect down Wilshire Boulevard all but unchanged. The area, long known as a commercial and institutional mecca, is set for some major new arrivals. Just next door, the new LA County Museum of Art by Peter Zumthor, Hon. FAIA, will debut in 2023. Only a few steps farther, the La Brea Tar Pits by Weiss/Manfredi will unveil their new home five years later. Until visitors turn the corner of Fairfax Avenue would they know the Academy Museum was there at all. Letting LA play itself, the museum revels in its urban locale. The outdoor Dolby Family Terrace atop the Sphere boasts one of the most dramatic views in town south of the hills.
All signs point to the Academy Museum being a hit with a diverse crowd, appealing alike to tourists and film freaks, Insta-influencers, and parents seeking a park upwind from the gaseous whiff of the tar pits. But the unmistakable spatial nod—whether conscious or not—to Piano’s early project may make design heads nostalgic for an older, weirder Renzo, one less eager for approval and more willing to experiment. Like many French movies adapted for American audiences—Claude Chabrol’s La Femme Infidèle (1969) remade as Unfaithful (2002) and Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) remade as 12 Monkeys (1995)—the Academy Museum design is very good. It’s just not as exciting as the source material.
