The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures project combines the renovation of the 1939 May Company department store and addition of the spherical 1,000-seat David Geffen Theater. Located on the LACMA campus, right next to two other Renzo Piano buildings, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and The Resnick Pavilion.
The museum, designed in collaboration with architect of record Gensler, includes 50,000 square feet of gallery space, two theaters, education labs, offices, conservation facilities, a restaurant and a retail store.
The architects lifted the addition of the ground to create space for an entrance plaza and keep the ground floor open to the public.The volume rests on a series of base isolator piers.
“The historic Saban Building is a wonderful example of Streamline Moderne style, which preserves the way people envisioned the future in 1939. The new structure, the Sphere Building, is a form that seems to lift off the ground into the perpetual, imaginary voyage through space and time that is moviegoing. By connecting these two experiences we create something that is itself like a movie. You go from sequence to sequence, from the exhibition galleries to the film theater and the terrace, with everything blending into one experience.”
- Renzo Piano
The two buildings that make up the museum are connected with three heavily engineered connection bridges. The bridges are designed to withstand seismic vibrations.
The museum journey reaches its conclusion when you walk through the top bridge that opens up to the glass-enclosed terrace with a spectacular panorama of Los Angeles. The dome is made up out of 1,500 laminated glass shingles, manufactured by Saint-Gobain in Austria.
For the skin of the sphere the architects opted for precast concrete because the material’s mass is good for acoustics.
Originally scheduled to open in 2020, due to delays related to COVID, the museum opened to the public at the end of September 2021.
