Inspiring Imagination

If Michael Maltzan never makes it to the pinnacle of architectural stardom, don’t blame the art world. In the past year alone, the Los Angeles-based architect was hired to design a sprawling new art park alongside the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary in Little Tokyo, unveiled a much-anticipated design for the renovation of the UCLA Hammer Museum in Westwood and witnessed the groundbreaking for the temporary home of the Museum of Modern Art in Queens, N.Y., that he designed. The last project should garner Maltzan the kind of international attention that most architects crave--and all that at the ripe young age of 40, a mere infant in architectural terms.

This can be a tricky moment for an architect. Creativity requires a willingness to take risks, to explore unknown territory. But who wants to risk stumbling as they approach a high point of their profession? What is more, Maltzan is philosophical by nature. His best designs--elegant, abstract compositions of line and volume--tend toward the reflective; they are never the radical expressions of the provocateur .

Maltzan’s design for the new $13.5-million Kidspace children’s museum in Pasadena, scheduled to break ground in December, is proof that the architect has not lost his creative fervor. A collision of old and new forms, the project is Maltzan’s brashest design to date--a powerful architectural narrative whose mission is to liberate the child’s creative imagination.

Located at the edge of Pasadena’s Brookside Park, the museum will occupy three 1930s-era barn-like buildings that frame a large courtyard. A new 18,000-square-foot building, which will house permanent exhibitions and a 300-seat theater, will anchor the courtyard’s fourth side, extending along the base of a nearby hill. The existing clapboard buildings remain a picture of quaintness; the new building’s sleek, linear forms carve through the site like a razor.

Getting to this point was arduous work. In 1999, when Maltzan completed a preliminary design for the museum, local preservationists reacted with open hostility, claiming that the building’s sprawling, hulking form destroyed the bucolic quality of the hillside site. Maltzan scrapped that design and came up with a much more compact scheme. Seen from the park, the new building appears as a series of blank white volumes that step back and decrease in size. A glass strip runs along the building’s base, which gives the composition an unusual delicacy.

Visitors enter through a narrow tunnel-like corridor that punches through one of the existing barns, depositing into the courtyard, like Alice tumbling through the rabbit hole. From there, the building breaks apart into a dynamic composition of long, horizontal planes. A ramp leads down into the main exhibition space. Light spills down through a long, narrow skylight above, braced by heavy canted beams. To the left, a clerestory allows for a brief view of the hill beyond. To the right, large windows overlook a sunken, outdoor exhibit area.

But only as you begin to move through the building does the larger narrative begin to take shape. A stair at the end of the room leads up to a second-story mezzanine. From there, the trail switches back once again, opening up momentarily to the hillside and eventually ending up in the temporary exhibition gallery, with a picturesque view of the park.

Other spaces play off that central theme. From the courtyard, for example, visitors can enter directly into the existing buildings, which are capped by wood trusses and dramatic skylights. A broad staircase leads down into the theater, which is tucked under the temporary exhibition gallery. Two massive sliding glass doors open up at the bottom of the stair during performances, allowing the sound to spill out into the courtyard. It is a potentially magical space.

The idea is to set up a gentle rhythm between contrasting worlds. The interiors are cozy, nurturing spaces, while the carefully framed exterior views are meant to provoke curiosity and encourage a spirit of adventure. At each step along the procession, the horizon literally broadens, as if the building is gently prodding the children to break the tethers of security.

But the project’s subtext is the same as any archetypal fairy tale: the fear, danger and excitement inherent in a child’s move toward independence. Yet expressed in architectural form, the message becomes more subliminal. The task, for Maltzan, is to give that idea potency without making it too explicit. In effect, he is exploring the limits of architecture’s power.

The narrative reaches its climax, for example, with two skewed, interlocking towers that rise out of a corner of the site, offering one final sweeping view of the surrounding city. To link the towers with the museum experience, the edges of the new building’s exit ramps line up with the towers’ base, which is across the courtyard, partially hidden behind the existing buildings. A sensitive eye will complete the composition, recognizing the point at which the lines of the ramp and tower would intersect.

It is a subtle gesture--perhaps too subtle. One expects the invisible axis between the ramp and tower to somehow break through the old building, or to cut more aggressively into the courtyard. If it did, it would heighten the tension between the buildings, and the design would achieve a greater compositional force.

But these are issues that take years, even decades, for a young architect to master. Architects learn their craft by building, examining their work, making mental corrections, then building some more. It is an insane, overwhelming process when you think about it. Artists can edit their work. If they don’t, gallery owners, museum curators and collectors do. Architects don’t have that luxury. They work on an often incomprehensible scale in a wide variety of materials. They must take into account complex social, cultural, psychological and physical realities. During all of this, they must contend with clients, who have their own particular needs. And if architects fail, the mistakes are not only public, they leave a lasting blemish on the landscape.

Under the circumstances, nurturing the talent of a young architect takes faith and patience. The Kidspace museum rewards that kind of patience with a brilliant design. It is both a leap forward for Maltzan and a lasting contribution to Pasadena’s already rich heritage of architectural landmarks.