Why Los Angeles County Museum of Art Resnick Pavilion matters.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art Resnick Pavilion is an expansive exhibition hall where Miracle Mile's museum corridor meets Renzo Piano's naturally illuminated architecture, immense curatorial flexibility and an encyclopedic program spanning cultures and centuries.
Set within Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Wilshire Boulevard campus near Spaulding Avenue and just steps from Urban Light, the pavilion occupies a freestanding position directly north of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and above the Pritzker Parking Garage. Renzo Piano Building Workshop conceived the single-story structure around an uninterrupted open floor plate, concrete flooring and a saw-tooth roof whose vertical glazing draws northern daylight deep into the interior. Pale travertine from the same quarry used for BCAM covers the east and west elevations, with glass enclosing the north and south sides and red mechanical structures continuing the architectural language Piano established elsewhere on the campus. Eighty-five percent of the gross footprint is devoted to displaying art, giving curators substantial freedom to divide the enormous interior for concurrent exhibitions or remove partitions for installations requiring exceptional horizontal space. The result is a low, luminous pavilion whose open plan, northern light, travertine enclosure and unusually high proportion of exhibition area turn architectural restraint into formidable curatorial capacity.
What defines Los Angeles County Museum of Art Resnick Pavilion.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art Resnick Pavilion is best known for completing the second major phase of Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Renzo Piano-led campus expansion through a 45,000-square-foot exhibition building conceived as the largest purpose-built, naturally lit open-plan museum space in the world. Lynda and Stewart Resnick supplied the $45 million lead gift for Phase II and pledged another $10 million in art to the permanent collection, attaching decades of patronage to a building whose final construction cost reached $53 million. Lynda Resnick had joined Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Board of Trustees in 1992 and later became vice chair and chair of its Acquisitions Committee, giving the commission an institutional relationship extending well before construction. The pavilion followed Piano's Broad Contemporary Art Museum, which opened in 2008 as Phase I of the campus Transformation, and the two buildings together added 100,000 square feet of gallery area. Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened the Resnick Pavilion with a free community weekend on October 2 and 3, 2010. Three simultaneous inaugural exhibitions demonstrated the building's intended range: Eye for the Sensual: Selections from the Resnick Collection presented European painting, sculpture and decorative arts; Olmec: Colossal Masterworks of Ancient Mexico assembled 120 objects associated with Mexico's earliest civilization; and Fashioning Fashion: European Dress in Detail, 1700-1915 drew 160 garments and accessories from a major collection newly acquired by Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Olmec exhibition was organized with Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco under Los Angeles County Museum of Art curator Virginia Fields, coinciding with celebrations of the bicentennial of Mexican independence and centennial of the Mexican Revolution. Sharon S. Takeda and Kaye D. Spilker curated Fashioning Fashion, using dress extending from the Enlightenment through World War I to inaugurate another portion of the building. Those three opening projects placed private European collecting, ancient Mesoamerican sculpture and two centuries of clothing within a single horizontal building, immediately demonstrating the breadth for which the pavilion had been commissioned.
Walter De Maria supplied a separate pre-opening chapter that tested the completed building at the scale of a single work before internal partitions subdivided the floor. Los Angeles County Museum of Art installed The 2000 Sculpture during 2010 specifically to use Piano's vast undivided interior and changing daylight before the pavilion officially opened. De Maria constructed the work from 2,000 white polygonal plaster rods arranged across the floor in a rigorously ordered herringbone grid measuring 10 by 50 meters. The sculpture had first appeared at Kunsthaus Zürich in 1992 and belonged to De Maria's decades-long development of room-sized horizontal works alongside projects including The Lightning Field, The Broken Kilometer and 360° I Ching. Los Angeles County Museum of Art director Michael Govan borrowed the work from a Swiss collector and used its installation to test the new building before the inaugural exhibitions occupied the hall. The project exposed a central architectural advantage before conventional exhibition walls appeared: a nearly acre-sized interior possessing enough uninterrupted floor area for a 164-foot sculpture to operate as a complete spatial composition. Govan subsequently emphasized the pavilion's single floor plate and rotating exhibition program as central to his conception of an encyclopedic museum in which art from different periods and cultures occupies shared architectural territory. The De Maria installation became an early demonstration of the pavilion at maximum openness, establishing the curatorial scale that later exhibitions inherited.
How Los Angeles County Museum of Art Resnick Pavilion fits.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art Resnick Pavilion works as the anchor for a Miracle Mile outing connecting Ice Age paleontology, Los Angeles film history and the automobile's profound role in shaping the city.
Begin at La Brea Tar Pits, where scientific investigation since 1913 has recovered millions of specimens spanning saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, mastodons, plants, rodents and insects from deposits preserving 50,000 years of environmental history. Pit 91 reopened in 1969 under the Rancho La Brea Project so researchers could apply intensive sampling methods to a deposit first encountered decades earlier, and construction of the George C. Page Museum in 1975 unexpectedly exposed another fossil concentration containing exceptionally numerous articulated specimens. Frank Thornton and Willis Fagan designed the museum that opened in 1977, embedding the structure into Hancock Park beneath sloping grass-covered walls and Manuel Paz's four-sided fiberglass frieze of Ice Age life. Construction elsewhere nearby produced another major discovery in 2006 when work on an underground parking structure exposed 16 fossil deposits, leading to the Project 23 excavation campaign. Continue to Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, which transformed the 1939 May Company department store into the largest museum in the United States devoted to filmmaking. Albert C. Martin Sr. and Samuel A. Marx designed the original Streamline Moderne building, including its cylindrical corner sheathed in hundreds of thousands of glass mosaic tiles backed with 24-karat gold foil. Renzo Piano Building Workshop restored and expanded the former department store as the Saban Building, joining it by glass bridges to a new 45,000-square-foot glass-and-concrete sphere containing the David Geffen Theater and Dolby Family Terrace. More than 200,000 replacement gold-backed tiles were fabricated by the original Italian manufacturer Orsoni during conservation of the historic cylinder, reconnecting the rehabilitation with the craftsmanship of the 1939 facade. Conclude at Petersen Automotive Museum, founded by magazine publisher Robert E. Petersen and Margie Petersen on June 11, 1994 to examine the automobile's history and cultural influence. The institution occupies a 1962 department store building originally designed by Welton Becket, tying its physical home to the automobile-oriented commercial development that characterized Wilshire Boulevard during the postwar period. A $90 million renovation completed in 2015 gave the structure a radically altered exterior by Kohn Pedersen Fox and reorganized the interior 25 rotating exhibitions with more than 150 vehicles on view. The progression moves from fossils preserving tens of thousands of years beneath Hancock Park through the adaptive reconstruction of a Golden Age department store for cinematic history and culminates in an institution devoted to the machine that decisively shaped Los Angeles's twentieth-century urban form.
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