Why you should experience Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, California.
Petersen Automotive Museum is a sculptural automotive institution where Miracle Mile's car-oriented urban character meets transportation history, design engineering and a collection spanning more than a century of motoring culture.
Set along Wilshire Boulevard near Fairfax Avenue and just steps from Museum Square, the four-story museum occupies a prominent corner parcel at one of the district's busiest intersections, with its exterior turning an entire city block into an architectural object visible across multiple approach angles. Sweeping stainless-steel ribbons wrap a red structural shell in long curves that project beyond the building envelope, giving the exterior depth through overlapping surfaces and open gaps. Approaching on foot reveals how the ribbons change alignment across the façades, alternately exposing and concealing the red wall behind them as the viewing angle shifts. Broad sidewalks, deep overhangs and the uninterrupted sweep around the corner add another physical dimension, translating automotive ideas of speed and aerodynamic movement into the building's exterior form. The result is a museum whose architecture makes automotive design legible at city scale before the collection itself comes into view.
What you should know about Petersen Automotive Museum.
Petersen Automotive Museum is best known for the automotive institution founded by publishing magnate Robert E. Petersen and his wife Margie on June 11, 1994 to examine the automobile's history and its influence on American culture. Petersen had entered publishing in 1948 with Hot Rod, building an enterprise whose titles subsequently included Motor Trend, Car Craft and numerous enthusiast publications that helped turn specialized automotive cultures into mass-media subjects. The museum initially operated within the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County before moving into a former department store completed in 1962 to a design by Welton Becket and Associates. Robert and Margie Petersen contributed $30 million toward establishing the institution in its permanent home, creating one of the largest philanthropic commitments devoted to automotive history at the time. Its collection expanded across production automobiles, motorcycles, competition vehicles, prototypes, customs, hot rods and machines connected with film and celebrity ownership, allowing automotive history to be interpreted through industrial design, engineering, manufacturing and popular culture. Robert Petersen died in 2007, and the Petersen Automotive Museum Foundation continued the institution as an independent nonprofit. A major reinvention began in the following decade with a $90 million renovation that reorganized the museum into 25 rotating exhibitions containing more than 150 vehicles above ground. The rebuilt institution reopened in December 2015, giving Petersen's publishing-era fascination with automobile culture a substantially expanded curatorial and architectural platform.
The museum's subterranean collection creates a second institutional dimension centered on preservation and access to vehicles beyond the principal galleries. The Vault contains more than 300 automobiles, motorcycles and trucks covering over 120 years of automotive history, substantially enlarging the portion of the collection accessible on site. Early machines share the collection with head-of-state automobiles, American classics, competition cars, prototypes, award-winning hot rods and vehicles formerly owned by prominent entertainment figures. Rotating selections allow the underground holdings to change without confining the collection to a single chronological sequence, supporting focused presentations drawn from specialized marques, designers and forms of competition. The museum's wider exhibition program follows the same model, with galleries devoted to subjects ranging from record-setting automobiles and American motorcycles to autonomous transportation, Italian coachbuilding and film vehicles. That breadth places industrial engineering, sporting performance, screen culture and stylistic experimentation within the same institution, extending the museum far beyond a static chronology of automobile manufacturing.
How to fold Petersen Automotive Museum into your trip.
Petersen Automotive Museum works as the anchor for a museum-district sequence tracing Los Angeles through craft experimentation, cinematic institution-building and a fossil archive preserved beneath the modern metropolis.
Begin at Craft Contemporary, whose institutional history began when painter Edith Robinson Wyle opened The Egg and the Eye on November 1, 1965 as a gallery and restaurant devoted to craft traditions and egg dishes. Wyle, a student of painter Rico Lebrun, established the venture inside a three-story neo-Georgian building designed by Gilbert Stanley Underwood in 1930, giving the emerging organization an architectural home predating the cultural institutions then reshaping Wilshire Boulevard. The Egg and the Eye developed during the expanding American craft movement and evolved into the Craft and Folk Art Museum in 1973, creating a permanent museum structure around Wyle's interest in handmade objects and international folk traditions. Subsequent institutional changes produced Craft Contemporary, retaining the original building and extending a lineage that began with an unconventional combination of food, exhibitions and collecting. Continue to Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, where the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences converted the 1939 May Company department store into the principal component of the largest American museum devoted to filmmaking. The original Streamline Moderne building contains a cylindrical corner sheathed in 350,000 glass mosaic tiles backed with 24-karat gold foil; restoration replaced more than 200,000 damaged tiles with pieces manufactured by the original Italian producer, Orsoni. Renzo Piano Building Workshop joined the restored 250,000-square-foot structure to a new 45,000-square-foot glass-and-concrete sphere containing the David Geffen Theater, with glass bridges connecting the two architectural periods. The completed complex joins six floors of galleries and educational facilities with a purpose-built theater and elevated terrace, physically linking Los Angeles retail architecture with an institution devoted to global cinema. Conclude at La Brea Tar Pits, where asphalt seeps have preserved evidence of plants and animals across the last 50,000 years beneath one of the densest cultural districts in Los Angeles. William Denton recognized animal remains from the seeps as fossils in 1875, W. W. Orcutt and F. M. Anderson renewed scientific investigation after 1901, and J. C. Merriam of the University of California, Berkeley advanced excavation during the following decade. Los Angeles County received exclusive excavation rights from G. Allan Hancock in 1913, and work through 1915 recovered more than 750,000 specimens from 96 sites before Hancock donated 23 acres for preservation as a county park in 1924. Construction activity produced another major disco in 2006, when excavation for an underground parking structure exposed 16 fossil deposits and a near-complete Columbian mammoth; the deposits became Project 23 and opened an immense new body of specimens for scientific study. The progression moves from Edith Wyle's craft institution through the architectural conversion of a major department store into a center for cinema and culminates in an active paleontological site where successive excavations continue extending the scientific history of prehistoric Los Angeles.
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