Group Studying Idea of $100-Million Museum Complex

An Irvine-based group of developers is exploring an ambitious idea to build a multipurpose museum complex in Orange County at a cost of $100 million or more.

The 40-acre museum park would include an administrative building, a sculpture garden, and six or more theme museums specializing in such topics as California history, air and space, natural history, and science and technology.

No site has been selected, but the group has identified the San Diego Freeway corridor as the best general location for the project and has held preliminary discussions with members of the Irvine City Council.

Museums under consideration include the Museum of Natural History and Science in Newport Beach and the Discovery Museum of Orange County in Santa Ana--both of which have also been suggested as possible tenants of Santa Ana’s proposed 90-acre museum district redevelopment project. With the Bowers Museum as a centerpiece, that project would include museums, offices, stores, restaurants and residences. (The Santa Ana Redevelopment Agency is awaiting results of an environmental impact report and an economic feasibility study.)

The museum committee, which has no official title, is an informal subgroup of Art Spaces Irvine. Art Spaces is the private, nonprofit support group of the City Council-appointed Art in Public Places Advisory Board, which works to create a public art program for Irvine.

Within the next six months, the museum committee plans to file for separate nonprofit status.

Committee members include Geoffrey LePlastrier, owner of LePlastrier Development and chairman of Art Spaces Irvine; Michael D. Ray and James (Walkie) Ray, principals with J. Ray Construction; Robert B. Smith, a developer and Orange Coast College psychology professor; Greg MacGillivray, president of MacGillivray-Freeman Films, and Tony Clark, executive director of the Severin Wunderman Museum in Irvine.

Michael D. Ray described the complex as “a world-class setting which would attract world-class users and over a long period of time--100 years or 150 years--become a world-class museum park. The only comparable type of thing that exists is the Smithsonian.”

The group initially hoped for a West Coast branch of the Smithsonian Institution, Ray said, but Smithsonian officials dissuaded them. The officials, however, did indicate that they would be receptive to a museum providing permanent exhibition space for traveling Smithsonian exhibitions.

Dudley Varner, executive director of the National History Foundation of Orange County (parent organization of the Museum of Natural History and Science), said that his group is still considering both museum complex projects, as well as other potential locations in Newport Beach’s Upper Bay and next to or on the UC Irvine campus.

The collection of the 3-year-old Museum of Natural History and Science consists of a large group of marine fossils and archeological material from the prehistoric Indians of Orange County.

Stephen Sandland, a trustee of the Discovery Museum, said his group is still exploring both projects. The museum, which opened in November, 1985, contains turn-of-the-century Orange County memorabilia and eventually will house natural science displays.

Last year, the museum committee held a two-day brainstorming session about its idea with planning consultant Harrison Price Co. of Torrance. Participants also included Helen Cameron, an Irvine school board member; John Rau, former chairman of the Orange County Performing Arts Center board of directors; Roger W. Seitz, Irvine Co. vice president for urban planning and design; museum consultant Walter Boyne, and museum designer Barry Howard.

“It’s a long-term project,” said Nicholas Winslow, president of Harrison Price. Each museum, he said, “would be a separate institution in its own right and also a member of the whole facility--kind of like the Claremont College facility. There are six colleges all on one campus with separate administrations, grading and curriculums, but a student can take courses at any of them.”

Winslow said he knows of no such museum cluster anywhere in the nation.

Although similar to Balboa Park in San Diego--which houses a constellation of museums specializing in different subjects--the Irvine group’s proposed museum park would differ primarily in its inclusion of a core orientation facility.

The building would offer audio-visual presentations on major themes--like “communications” or “housing”--that make connections between the separate disciplines of each museum.

Museums in the complex would emphasize “state of the art” educational devices rather than what Smith called “the heavy kind of curatorial (research) and the (permanent) collections associated with some (major) museums.”

Preliminary plans call for an organizational framework similar to that of the Music Center of Los Angeles County, which provides maintenance and other services to each of its resident performing companies. As tenants of the museum complex’s operating company, the museums would each be separate nonprofit institutions with their own boards. An “umbrella” museum park organization would screen potential new additions to the complex and help subsidize the operations of each resident museum.

The project would be built in phases, beginning with the core facility and two of the satellite museums. Phase One building costs (excluding land) are estimated at $30 million. With annual operating costs pegged at about $400,000, the total Phase 1 capital requirement is estimated at $35 million.

Annual operation costs for the museum park at completion of the project are put at $1 million annually.

Committee members have so far spent about $20,000 of their own money on the project, primarily for the sessions with Harrison Price Co. They hope to attract future financing from manufacturing or high-technology companies.

But finding a site is the committee’s first task.

Michael Ray, vice president of the group, said that after extensive discussions with Irvine city officials, “we find no one opposed to it.”

“People I’ve talked to think this is a good idea. The issue for them is, first, do the citizens of the city want it and, second, is there a site that exists already that’s in the public domain.

“We’re taking a very ambitious idea public and seeing who salutes. If we get a bunch of boos, we’ll know it’s not a good idea.”

Edward A. Dornan, an Irvine city councilman, said the museum backers and council members discussed the idea about 1 1/2 years ago. But he added that no formal proposal has been submitted.

“It sounds like an exciting idea,” Dornan said. “As long as they aren’t talking about an alligator farm or a wax museum, it sounds good.”

Ray said the project would complement rather than compete with other museums in the county.

“No. 1, we’re not doing any (museum) that competes with them. No. 2, what we have planned is under the best of circumstances 5 to 10 years in the future, and No. 3, it’s kind of like Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm. They’re different things; they help each other. . . . If you’re in New York, one day you go to the Metropolitan Museum; the next day you go to the Museum of Modern Art.”

Kevin Consey, director of the Newport Harbor Art Museum, agreed:

“It’s a mutually supportive situation. The more museums and cultural institutions there are in a community, the more interested people are in culture--be it art, natural history, science and technology, whatever.”

Consey also said he thinks the committee is “absolutely on target by trying to nail down a commitment to property first and develop an infrastructure around it later. . . . They’re all extremely reputable, extremely competent people who have a personal and professional stake in the growth of Orange County. . . . They certainly have adequate clout to get the project (off the ground).”

Paul Piazza, director of the Bowers Museum, said he is not worried that the Irvine group’s project would compete with the Bowers, which is mostly devoted to the art and culture of the Americas.

But he suggested that the museum committee might want to join forces with the Santa Ana project. Unlike a self-contained museum park, the Santa Ana concept also includes businesses, restaurants and residential buildings.

LePlastrier dismissed the idea of combining forces. The county, he said, is big enough to support both projects. “I’m in the real estate business. Does that mean Orange County can only have one retail shopping center?”

But, he conceded, the project “that gets in place first is probably going to have the edge on this thing.”