Children’s Museum Unveils Plans for 2 New Facilities

The Children’s Museum of Los Angeles unveiled preliminary plans Friday for its two new museums, one at the Hansen Dam Recreation Area in the northeast San Fernando Valley, the other downtown.

“We’re really buzzed about it,” said Edwin Schlossberg, 55, who will create the exhibits for both museums.

Schlossberg and his New York-based firm have designed exhibits for dozens of cultural institutions, including several children’s museums and the Immigration History Center at Ellis Island.

In Burbank on Friday, Schlossberg talked publicly for the first time about his vision for the Hansen Dam museum, set to open in 2003, which will be energy-efficient and centered on the environment.

The Hansen Dam museum will contain a series of interactive exhibits that make use of the suburban wilderness that surrounds the planned museum, he said. Noted for exhibits that help people empathize with animals, Schlossberg proposed an electronics-packed character, called Dogbear, that will respond to visitors, and another called Tree.

“Tree and Dogbear won’t work unless people feed and take care of them,” he said.

Transportation systems will circulate youngsters’ artwork throughout the building, perhaps hanging from a giant dry-cleaner’s rack or riding on flatbed cars on an interior railroad, he said.

About 34,000 square feet will be devoted to exhibits and areas where visitors may interact and collaborate: “You have to create opportunities for the kids to get involved with one another,” he said.

It also will include oases of quiet: “We want lots of spaces where kids can get out of the mix and have moments of reverie,” he said.

The natural world will be an intrinsic part of the museum, which has been designed to marry with the landscape. A visitor to one of its workshops might use art materials to recreate the wing of a dragonfly, an insect much in evidence on the 1-acre museum site.

Construction, set to start in June 2002, is expected to cost at least $12 million, with another $12 million budgeted for exhibits, said museum Director Candace Barrett. Scheduled to open in January 2003, the museum will be situated just east of Osborne Street and Foothill Boulevard in Lake View Terrace.

It also will include an observatory filled with tools for scrutinizing the environment, from the splotch-sided lizards that scurry across the site to the sky above. Some exhibits will have screens, but few devices will be reminiscent of televisions, Schlossberg said.

“We didn’t want a TV kind of environment,” he said. “There’s no sense in creating an environment that recreates what children can do at home.”

A site has not yet been selected for downtown, though one is being sought in Little Tokyo, near the Japanese American National Museum and the Geffen Contemporary Museum of Art. The 100,000-square-foot building called Art Park is scheduled to open in mid-2005. It will focus on the city, the visual and performing arts and communications, Barrett said.

Los Angeles architect Sarah Graham, who will work with Schlossberg on the Hansen Dam project, said that unlike most new buildings, the Hansen Dam museum will not have traditional air-conditioning.

Wind--plentiful in the area--will be funneled into the building to help cool it, augmented by other conservation-minded techniques, Graham said. Solar energy will be used to heat the building’s water and to generate some of its electricity.

The museum will be built into a hill topped with earth and planted with native flora. Graham imagines visitors--young and old--walking on the roof and playing in the mist used to cool the structure.

“The whole building is an exhibit about the environment,” she said.