Source: academymuseum.org; Joshua White/JW Pictures

Renzo Piano and the Academy Museum

by SweisKloss
March 3, 2022

Los Angeles offers ample opportunities to stay attuned to the arts, and one way is through visiting many of the unique museums around town. With the Oscars coming up this month, we thought it’d be a relevant and fun nod to the film industry—with an architecture spin, of course—by focusing on the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Designed by legendary architect Renzo Piano, the museum is a fascinating study in architecture, design, construction, historic preservation, and sustainability.

Italian-born Piano grew up in a family of builders and would often visit construction sites with his father. He also worked at his father’s construction company after he graduated college where he studied architecture. Perhaps because of his construction and engineering beginnings, he became known for overcoming architectural challenges through technological knowledge and will often have his mentees look at his work for its methodology first and foremost.

Renzo Piano’s body of work is quite accomplished; his first major project was the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1977. Shortly after, Piano founded Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) in 1981 and subsequently took on many more major projects such as the Kansai Airport in Osaka, the New York Times Building, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His list of awards is equally as impressive, which includes receiving the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Award.

With Piano’s experience and design sense, there’s no question as to why RPBW was selected in 2012 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to lead the design for the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Piano and his team needed to marry the historic Wilshire May Company building, now named the Saban Building in honor of the benefactors, with new construction to create a 300,000-square-foot campus in the heart of the Miracle Mile district. The new Sphere Building on the north end is a 45,000-square-foot space and made up of glass and concrete, housing the theater and terrace. The Saban Building contains six floors of exhibitions, special event spaces, a smaller art-house theater, education studio, shop, and restaurant.

In addition to the preservation and adaptive reuse, the museum has implemented environmentally responsible systems such as solar-tracked automated shading and ventilation, waste reduction programs, and stormwater reuse system for landscape irrigation. In October of 2020, the museum was awarded a LEED Gold Certification by the U.S. Green Building Council.

Credit also goes to Gensler (executive architect), Buro Happold (Structural Engineer), and Matt Construction (General Contractor) for getting the museum off the ground. The museum officially opened to the public in September of 2021.

According to the Academy Museum’s website, Renzo “Piano has said that had he not chosen to become an architect, he would have been a filmmaker instead. Here he has an opportunity to embrace both, creating a film museum in which visitors enter the historic Saban Building to encounter cinema’s historical past and cross the bridge into the inventive Sphere Building to encounter its future. ‘A movie theater is a place where you invite people to take off,’ the architect says.”