so this building is both the
storage facility for the collection
and also exhibition space and to balance the two was a great challenge with the added
important ambition of helping to urbanize
downtown L.A.
Los Angeles as you know
empties out and these culture
institutions here are
sometimes really without a center of
gravity and I think more and more
with Disney hall and now with our building and MOCA across the street there is more of a center of gravity in downtown.
So, a building that's really generous to the public and truly public should be transparent, it
should be open, open to the street and so
forth.
The challenge was that because of the
size of this storage facility here
for the collection, which has a whole different set of needs, relative to the
urban challenges, it was always a bit of
tug of war. In addition we have this
fantastic building to our South, Disney hall,  which is very sculptural exuberant; our site is
much smaller, much lower and we have a
lot of program to go into it. So we made
a kind of concept
that comprises what we call the veil and the vault,
and the vault is basically the
housing for the collection and it sits
right in the middle of the building.
You walkt under it, you shoot through it in the escalator, you stand on top of it - we are standing
on top of it right now - you can wind your
way through it and looking to pre-curated art,
hm,
on top of the vault is what we call the veil, and it's a five sided facade that absorbs
light. It brings light in from Grand Avenue,
its corners, the top, and it's meant to be a kind of contrast to Disney hall
which is shiny and smooth, and this is
absorptive and matte. It's very different, it's a relation of contrast. So Grand Avenue
which is the main drag here, is actually 45
degrees off of the north-south grid, so when
we started with this property we first
just figured out the north is at almost
45 degrees, the skylights are facing the
north and the geometries then resolve
themselves to come to the urban edges on all four sides and that
was part of a really you know
big architectural trick to do that but we
also wanted that natural light to come
in from Grand Avenue and actually just
as much as we could to the north and to the
south to have that sense of presence of L.A., you  know most museums are opaque to the street, they are cut of,
light is not usually welcome too much but we designed this in a way
where the light is superbly filtered
we have a kind of
every square foot on this one acre
of foreplate receives the same amount of
indirect light, but you still sense when a cloud comes over, you sense, when you come close to the vail
you see little small views, framed views
of the street, and public, and cars and so forth
so you feel, and even the Gehry, Disney hall.
So you feel that presence constantly. But one of the big ambitions, architecturally here, was to also have
a single acre which is entirely column free. So there is absolutely no structure that
reaches the ground and it goes about 70 meters, a little less than 70 meters in both
directions, and these walls are all
movable, so the next show could have fewer walls
or more walls, and will be ultimately flexible in its life. But to us it was a very, very important dramatical idea,
to come from the light of the street through the vault with its opacity and mystery
and come up to a kind of sublime surface with natural light and the art and then
to come back down, and this is where
all of the circulation actually converges, the fast elevator, the slow stair and the semi-fast
escalator, all get to the same point, so
it's very intuitive in terms of how you
circulate,
you always know where you are.
