Natural History Museum Picks Architect for a Radical Renovation

The Museum of Natural History of Los Angeles County has selected New York-based architect Steven Holl to design a $200-million to $300-million renovation and expansion that would radically alter the existing complex in Exposition Park.

The scope of the renovation would rival the recent plan to tear down and rebuild the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Museum officials, who are to announce Holl’s selection today, stress that this is a preliminary plan. Nonetheless, Holl’s strategy calls for the demolition of all of the post-1920s additions, retaining the original 1913 Beaux Arts structure and the four 1920s-era diorama halls.

Holl, 54, who has emerged as one of the most celebrated American architects of his generation, was selected over four other entrants: the Swiss team of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron; the Boston-based Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti; Norman Foster & Partners of London; and David Chipperfield, also of London.

The museum’s officials have yet to raise any money for the project. But at a time when the county is suffering from severe budget constraints, they insist that the bulk of the funds will be raised from private donations. As much as a third, however, could come from government sources, including a possible county bond issue.

A master plan will be publicly unveiled in fall 2003 and a schematic design in 2004, in time for the start of a major capital campaign. Construction is to begin in 2006, with completion in 2009.

The existing museum, a public and private partnership, is a jumble of mismatched additions that the board considers inadequate for the institution’s exhibition goals and storage needs.

The original structure is part of a formal Beaux Arts scheme that extends across the Rose Garden to the east. In 1927, the museum completed its first major addition, a 250,000-square-foot wing. But because of the Great Depression, museum officials were never able to raise the money needed to complete the building’s facade. In 1958, the Jean Delacour Auditorium was added, and the North Wing addition, whose Brutalist concrete facade overlooks USC, was completed in 1974.

Holl’s plan would restore the original 1913 domed Beaux Arts structure, as well as the existing diorama halls. The unfinished exterior of the 1920s addition would be stripped away, and the new building would slip over the halls like a sleeve, extending to the west and forming an L-shape that would flank two sides of the existing south lawn. Parking would be relocated underground, tucked underneath this new wing.

This configuration would allow Holl to anchor the museum in a series of landscaped parks, each with its own identity. The Rose Garden would retain its formal relationship with the original museum. The south lawn would become a bus drop-off for school groups, as well as the museum’s main entry, and would overlook a broad reflecting pool. To the north, the removal of the 1970s addition and a nearby parking lot would make room for a large “science garden” overlooking the USC campus. Holl envisions this park as an extension of the museum’s exhibition space that could be used for shows on sustainable housing, garden exhibitions and the like.

The proposed addition, which would house the majority of the museum’s collections, rests within these three garden areas, its form pierced by a series of big, amoeba-shaped courtyards. A three-story lobby would cut through the center of the structure, linking the south lawn to the science garden. A narrow, sliver-like tower, which would house museum offices, would rise out of the structure’s roof to the east.

These forms have an environmental function. The courtyards, for example, are conceived as gigantic valves that would serve to pump air in and out of the building. A chimney stack set inside the tower would suck hot air out of the underground parking structure.

But the design also is part of a larger idea about how best to reorganize the museum’s collections. The museum is now organized as a series of independent collections, which Holl likens to the structure of a tree with a number of independent branches. In its place, Holl suggests a “rhizomatic” plan, in which the various departments are connected via nonlinear paths, so the collection could be experienced in a variety of ways. In this diagram, the courtyards would act as social gathering places, with enormous ramps spiraling up to the museum’s upper floors.

A benefit of the scheme, which has not been released to the public due to its preliminary nature, is that it can be phased in over time without shutting down the museum. The addition could be completed first and then opened for exhibits as demolition and renovation proceed on the existing buildings.

The selection of Holl is part of a broader effort to return the traditional Beaux Arts park to its former splendor and make it a showplace for contemporary design. The first step in this transformation occurred in 1983 with the completion of Frank Gehry’s aerospace museum, a building whose compact, fragmented forms were decorated with a jet mounted on its facade and a giant ball balanced on its roof. The nearby California Science Center, designed by Zimmer Gunsul Frasca and completed in 1998, was a lesser work but still contemporary in spirit.

More recently, construction has begun on a project that will transform the existing armory building into a Science Center school and research facility designed by Thom Mayne of the Los Angeles-based Morphosis. Plans are underway for other enhancements, such as a $30-million community recreation center and a 2,100-space parking structure.

Holl rose to prominence in the early 1980s, with the construction of a series of small but innovative houses on the East Coast. The best of these were marked by a haunting, poetic quality. A 1981 housing proposal for New York City, never built, set a row of small apartment towers along an abandoned section of the elevated train tracks. Linked by a narrow, internal garden, the buildings seemed to float just above the downtown skyline. In a later design for a house in Martha’s Vineyard, the architect created an exterior framework of stud walls and rails that evoked the skeleton of a beached whale.

Among Holl’s most admired projects is a 1991 housing project in Fukuoka, Japan, built at a time when most architects had given up on the idea of designing large-scale housing projects. Large, cube-shaped openings--which served as entries to the apartments--were carved out of the structure’s simple concrete form. In back, a series of reflecting pools was set between the building’s finger-like forms, reflecting light up into the interior.

Holl’s first major museum project was the 1998 Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland. The museum was conceived as two interlocking bars, the form of one seeming to wrap over the other, enclosing a soaring interior atrium. More recent projects include a major addition to the Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Mo., whose boxy glass forms evoke shards of glass scattered across a lush green landscape, and an undergraduate residence hall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, which Holl refers to as a “sponge building” because of the large, amoeba-shaped rooms carved out of its hulking, concrete interior.

If there is a weakness in Holl’s work, it is a tendency to clutter up his buildings’ bold forms with unnecessary gestures. In the 1996 Makuhari housing project in Chiba, Japan, a series of small bug-like apartments is embedded into the roof of the housing block’s concrete shell, a bizarre gesture that adds nothing to the success of the design. A losing competition design for LACMA included a rooftop sculpture garden scattered with a series of strange, rock-shaped light wells that together resembled a moonscape.

Nonetheless, Holl’s selection for the Natural History Museum adds him to an increasingly long list of celebrated architects who, collectively, are rebuilding the city’s civic landscape. Such projects now include the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, designed by Spanish architect Jose Rafael Moneo and scheduled to open in September; Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, opening in 2003; and a new LACMA, designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and scheduled for completion in 2008.