ARCHITECTURE

BRENDA LEVIN,

NORMAN PFEIFFER

Designers, Griffith Observatory

When the Griffith Observatory reopens next fall after four years of restoration work to its peeling domes and fading murals, it will include 37,000 square feet of new space, most of it tucked below ground. The unveiling will also substantially raise the public profile of two architects who are already established figures in the field: Brenda Levin, known for reviving the Wiltern Theatre and the Bradbury Building, among many projects, and Norman Pfeiffer, a partner in the New York-based firm Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates until its dissolution last year. (Pfeiffer now runs his own firm, Pfeiffer Partners, in Los Angeles.)

Few buildings in L.A. are as beloved -- or, thanks to Nicholas Ray and James Dean, as iconic -- as the observatory, operated by the city’s Parks and Recreation Department. Parks and Rec, though, hardly has a sterling record when it comes to high-stakes restoration work. Here’s hoping that Pfeiffer Partners, which is overseeing the project and designing the new construction, and Levin, whose firm is concentrating on the restoration, can help change that.

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JEAN NOUVEL

Designer, Guthrie Theater

Jean Nouvel designed two of France’s most stunning contemporary buildings: the headquarters of the Arab Institute in Paris and of the Cartier Foundation just outside the city limits. Now the 60-year-old architect brings his brash style to the American Midwest with a $125-million new home for the Guthrie Theater on the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis -- Nouvel’s first completed building in the U.S.

The heart of the design, which replaces the Guthrie’s old Ralph Rapson-designed home next door to the Walker Art Center, is a series of three auditoriums, ranging from 250 to 1,100 seats. There will be drama on the exterior as well: Oversized silk-screened images of actors from past Guthrie productions will be attached to the midnight-blue facade and dramatically illuminated at night.

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KAZUYO SEJIMA, RYUE NISHIZAWA

Designers, Toledo Museum of Art

Kazuyo Sejima, above right, who runs a Tokyo firm called SANAA with partner Ryue Nishizawa, left, is as respected within the architecture profession for her precise, minimalist designs as she is unknown beyond it. Her wider anonymity began to crack with the news that SANAA would design a new home for the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York (due in 2008); it may crumble altogether next year when the new wing at the Toledo Museum of Art, with SANAA’s very promising design, opens in Ohio.

A low-slung, two-story pavilion designed to hold the museum’s collection of glass objects, along with studios for glass blowing, the building is nearly all glass itself. Coolly restrained even by Sejima’s standards, it will slip unobtrusively into an existing grove of trees.