Petersen Renovation Plan Is No Lamborghini

The proposed renovation of the Petersen Automotive Museum is the architectural equivalent of a Ford Taurus. Neither flamboyant nor particularly innovative, the design will not inspire a sense of awe. But for those whose tastes run toward the blandly dependable, the project will most likely satisfy the museum’s basic functional needs.

Designed by Keating/Khang Architecture of Los Angeles, the renovation project is the most recent in a long list of building projects by Los Angeles institutions hoping to raise their cultural profiles. With a $30-million budget, the Petersen renovation is comparatively modest. It will add roughly 40,000 square feet to the existing 72,600 square feet of exhibition space, providing a street-level restaurant and a range of event spaces, from a penthouse ballroom to a tent-like hall that will be erected atop the museum’s existing parking structure.

Sleek and unpretentious, the simple geometric forms and taut glass exterior--which will be layered over the building’s existing shell--are an undeniable improvement over the current museum, a former department store whose brooding profile and cluttered interiors make it one of the dreariest museum spaces in the city.

But to those who love architecture, the design is also a monument to missed opportunities. The automobile has been a central theme of some of the century’s most inspired architectural inventions. And the Petersen project was an obvious opportunity to tap into L.A.’s car culture ethos. The outcome, however, is a design that never touches on such poetic possibilities, resulting in a somewhat mundane building proposal.

The museum stands at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, half a block from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The three-story structure was designed for a Japanese retail chain in 1962 by Welton Becket and Associates, a respected corporate firm that was then known for its clean Modernist aesthetic. The museum bought the space in 1992 and, with minimal alterations, converted it for its current role.

The new design literally envelops the existing structure in a series of new forms and functions. A glass curtain wall will be erected over the building’s concrete facades along Wilshire and Fairfax, giving the building a sleeker high-tech look. An expanded fourth floor, which will contain the museum’s ballroom, will be built on top of the existing structure and will be framed by balconies on two sides. A second event space will be housed in a low, faceted, tent-like form set on top of the existing parking structure.

The new Wilshire Boulevard facade is intended to give the building a more muscular public presence, and it succeeds to a certain degree. In the current version of the design, escalators climb the facade’s interior, a slot-like atrium that acts as a sort of display case for internal circulation. (The architects are considering moving the escalators to the building’s Fairfax Avenue side, which would make the Wilshire facade nothing more than a decorative gesture.)

But the building’s real public face is along Fairfax. There, the glass curtain wall will extend along the building’s surface, its southern edge folding back to enclose a second atrium that tilts dramatically over a small courtyard that will serve as outdoor seating for the restaurant. The effect is slightly more dynamic, and the presence of the restaurant creates a more inviting experience at street level.

The idea is to draw people back to the museum’s main entry, which will be situated just to the right of the restaurant, flanked by the museum building on one side and the parking structure on the other. The design transforms what is now a dark, claustrophobic space into a broad, open-air porte-cochere. Visitors will enter the parking lot from Fairfax and proceed to the museum through an open-air court, with light spilling down through a cylindrical light well.

That kind of clarity extends into the exhibition spaces, which are generous. A small gift shop will flank the entry. The offices--currently scattered throughout the second and third floors--will be moved to basement level. By setting the escalators along one of the two facades, the architects are able to free more interior space and give visitors a visual clue about how to move through the building.

It is the event spaces that dominate the design. The fourth-floor ballroom is the kind of large, flexible and banal space that one could find in any conventional hotel. Its single positive feature is its balconies, which offer a sweeping view of the Hollywood Hills and, one day, the Rem Koolhaas- designed Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which is in planning stages.

The tent-like event space is slightly more promising. In a general sense, it is an obvious nod to Koolhaas’ LACMA design, a taut, high-tech tent-like structure, propped on slender columns above a public plaza, that will house the museum’s collections. But although Koolhaas’ structural pyrotechnics are part of a cohesive--even revolutionary--plan to re-imagine the entire museum experience, Keating/Khang’s version is less rooted in a clear conceptual approach to that museum’s function.

To the early Modernists, for example, the car represented the coming of a new mass production age, one that would function with the efficiency and speed of the assembly line. Projects like the 1923 Lingotto factory in Turin, Italy, embodied those values. Its long, low form was anchored at each end by an elliptical ramp that led up to a swooping rooftop test track. Frank Lloyd Wright’s unbuilt 1925 Gordon Strong Automobile Objective building was designed as a towering, truncated cone, with twin spiraling ramps for cars and pedestrians that led up to a 360-degree viewing deck. The idea was to make the car a central component of the architectural experience.

Today, both projects remain compelling visions of 20th century design.

The design for the new Petersen Museum ignores that vision. For a museum that houses cars, it is remarkably static and dull. The exhibition spaces could just as well house soup cans as models of automotive engineering.

Of course, given the limited budget, it may have been asking too much to expect an architectural tour de force. Still, the project is a missed opportunity in more ways than one. Los Angeles is ripe with young, budding architectural talents who could have used such a commission to test new ideas. Many of these architects are updating the old machine aesthetic for a new age.

The museum could have plucked one and offered the opportunity to create a building that tapped into the city’s youth culture with a more accessible language that embraced the car more fully.

After all, Los Angeles is the city that revolves around a car culture. What we need is an emblem for a city in perpetual motion, not a monument to creative gridlock.