The stars go Hollywood

ALONG with many other pairs of lovers, the Earth has often arranged to meet the sky up at the Griffith Observatory. Twelve-year-olds placed a cautious eye to the 12-inch Zeiss telescope and focused on the moons of Jupiter. The sun revealed its face to millions of teenagers who came to gawk into the mirrors of the celeostat. Sitting in the worn seats of the planetarium, each visitor had the illusion that the universe was not actually cold, distant or infinite -- but comfortably contained within the marble walls of a 1935 Art Deco temple. And yes, come evening, as they stood on the terrace to watch the lights flare across the great sea-bordered basin, they often discovered that even if they had neglected to bring someone to kiss, the metropolis itself had grown surprisingly beautiful.

For the last four years, the Griffith has been closed for renovation and expansion -- a whole $93 million worth -- and all that time, local lovers have had to find other spots to rendezvous. Twelve-year-olds have been forced to consort with textbooks and IMAX movies. And if the sky found another place to meet the Earth, surely it was not inside the city limits. We’ll have to wait until late fall for the Griffith to reopen, but up the winding road above the Greek Theatre, restoration of the building is almost complete. The copper domes have been re-clad, the mythological murals cleaned and cracks in the marble fixed.

Today, the few visitors allowed into the construction site also find that large and mysterious boxes have begun to arrive -- packed not just with a refurbished Foucault pendulum and Tesla coil but with fresh wonders. On the west side of the observatory, a tall black monolith, closely resembling the one in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” now broods above the basin. More than $10 million is being spent to create a new Samuel Oschin Planetarium theater (renamed for the late benefactor) and produce what should be the most technologically advanced star show on the planet. Deep underneath the observatory, a large cave has been dug to house a considerable slice of the heavens itself.

Designers of the 60-plus new exhibits insist they will get beyond current notions of “science centers” to conjure a new kind of spectacle up on Mt. Hollywood. And if all goes as promised, according to the city of L.A. and its partner, the nonprofit Friends of the Observatory (FOTO), a city-sponsored institution will be unveiled that can stand alongside the private Getty Museum and county-owned Walt Disney Concert Hall in the public imagination -- a truly world-class meeting place for earth and sky. Here’s an advance peek.

An out-of-the-box experience

“I believe that when the museum community sees what happened here, they’ll probably have a hard time understanding it.” Edwin C. Krupp is leaning against a railing down in the “Gunther Depths of Space,” the new, 35,000-square-foot underground expansion.

On the wall below us, metal supports are being installed to hold the world’s largest astronomical photograph -- a full 150 feet long and 20 feet high, fused onto 114 black porcelain panels and canted at an angle of 10 degrees into the room -- a massive piece of the universe trapped in a cave. “The Big Picture” will be so big that up here on a viewing ledge called the “Edge of Space,” small telescopes will be stationed for visitors to make their own discoveries among the hundreds of thousands of stars and many thousands of galaxies spinning like so many Frisbees through the night. Knit together from multiple observations at the Palomar Observatory, scientists at Caltech are still counting the total number of stellar objects in the photo.

Unfortunately, the porcelain panels have not yet arrived, so right now we’re merely looking at the tip of Krupp’s index finger, which he’s holding out at arm’s length to show the tiny rectangle of sky that has been blown up into the “Big Picture.” Krupp, 61, is a curious mix of scientist and showman -- a kind of impresario for the expanding universe. In the 32 years he has directed the Griffith, his wiry frame, fine mustache and rapid-fire delivery have become landmarks in the local astronomy community -- and today he seems almost able to conjure the Big Picture with sheer willpower. It was Krupp who wrote the first letter, back in 1978, to suggest that the city consider a major renovation of its neglected treasure, and he founded the Friends of the Observatory, which has been working toward this moment for nearly three decades.

“[The new Griffith] won’t be in the mainstream of exhibition design at science centers, astronomy museums, or any kind of museums,” says Krupp with emotion. “If it fits into an evolution of museums at all, I would say it is a return to the grandeur of those great institutions of the early part of the 20th century, which emerged out of a combination of a century of progress and a P.T. Barnum experience. Everything here will be intended to have a theatrical as well as an intellectual impact.”

If that sounds a bit Hollywood, he doesn’t seem to mind. Indeed, as he lowers his finger, he adds: “I say, make it bigger than life, then let people take that for what it’s worth and run with it. We’re an observatory, not a textbook. It’s our job to put people ‘eyeball to the universe.’ ”

Krupp repeats that last phrase often -- a kind of mantra drawn from the words of Col. Griffith J. Griffith, who donated most of the 4,100-acre Griffith Park in 1896 and later funded the public observatory that was constructed after his death. Col. Griffith had looked through the telescope at Mt. Wilson, in its day the most important research observatory in the world, and said, “If all mankind could look through that telescope, it would change the world.” When the Griffith Observatory opened, it was only the third planetarium in North America and the first public facility of its kind. The domes, designed by architect John C. Austin, were never intended for serious research, but since 1935, millions have peered through that 12-inch Zeiss.

Standing beside Krupp on the tour this afternoon is Mark Pine, deputy director of FOTO, who speaks with an almost boyish fervor. “People can come here to learn, but our intent will not be to teach people, our intent will be to inspire them. We’re keeping the text to a minimum. We want people to experience things. We want to give them tools to use, as they will, in 8,000 different ways.”

Right now, Pine spends most of his time flying around the country to supervise construction of marvels including an 8-foot, etched-crystal model of the Milky Way Galaxy; a walk-through Martian landscape; a rotating overhead model of lunar phases; and, of course, scaled globes of the local worlds. Each, he hopes, will prove “monumental, something you can’t find in your living room or on your computer screen.” Most of the exhibits will be designed by C&G; Partners of New York (formerly part of Chermayeff & Geismar), where 12 people have been employed on the project for the last six years. Past C&G; clients have included Ellis Island, the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans and the Jefferson Library at Monticello.

Outside, Krupp shows us where schoolchildren will stroll along metal loops inscribing the planetary orbits and carefully traces other lines cut into an upper terrace to indicate solstices and equinoxes. The black monolith will track our favorite yellow dwarf with optics mounted on its crown. Here a lens will focus sunbeams onto an arc in a glass-walled “transit corridor” attached to the west side of the structure, and will keep track of dates in the same way European cathedrals once kept a religious calendar using sunbeams shooting through holes cut in their stone walls.

Just now, as we watch the monolith glower against evening sky and glittering city, Pine can’t help whistling “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” the theme from Stanley Kubrick’s classic “2001.” It’s gotten cold outside, but the image is compelling, and we linger as Krupp describes his desire “to use the building itself as an instrument.” He’s written books about ancient sites, including Stonehenge in England and Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, where sky-watching was built into the very architecture of a place. In fact, he’s visited nearly 1,800 ancient observatories around the world, and although he denies any emotional bond with the shamanistic types who created them, he admits he’s trying to summon up “the real thing” for city dwellers who have lost touch.

“The real night sky is now so remote that most people have forgotten what it looks like,” he once wrote -- and he likes to tell the story of the Jan. 17, 1994, earthquake, after which people called to report an “odd sky” over Los Angeles. The staff was at first puzzled but eventually understood that, with the power out, people were simply seeing a full set of stars for the first time.

Putting synergy to the test

THE city of L.A. has never been famous for taking good care of its historic assets, but many hope the Griffith will add momentum to a growing preservationist movement here.

“Everyone on the government side knows that this is a chance to show what L.A. can do,” says Linda J. Barth, who’s overseeing the project on behalf of the city’s Department of Recreation & Parks. Like others, she points to the success of the 1993 Central Library expansion as proof that the city bureaucracy has learned to create and maintain significant public landmarks by working closely with private groups. In fact, all the designers are now working directly for FOTO, and when the exhibits are in place, it will simply donate them to the city.

“Because we’re an independent entity, we can go out and look for exactly the right thing, and hire exactly the right person,” without red tape, emphasizes Camille Lombardo, the hard-charging executive director of Friends, who’s credited with lining up major contributors and driving the project forward to this point. Lombardo, who gave up a banking career to work on the Griffith effort, recently supported a delay in the opening, extending it from the original target of this May.

The real test of the collaboration, warns FOTO President David Gold, a retired aerospace entrepreneur, will come much later. “The observatory was an excellent thing which was neglected in the past. Right now, lots of smart people are working wonderfully together to create excellence up there again. We have to make sure the systems are in place to keep it excellent over the long haul.”

But the Griffith does seem to occupy a place in the hearts of Angelenos even deeper than the library or the more recently renovated City Hall. “This is the crown jewel; I absolutely feel that this is the biggest thing that’s going to happen to Los Angeles in 2006,” says former City Councilwoman Joy Picus, who chairs FOTO. “When people hear I’m involved with the Griffith Observatory, they always tell me the most wonderful stories. They tell me, ‘I had my first kiss up there,’ ‘I got engaged up there,’ ‘I came with my fifth-grade class and I kept coming back.’ ”

Of the $93-million budget, about one-third has come from voter-approved bonds, one-third from the city and about one-third has been raised privately. Whatever happens with the exhibits, Angelenos will be pleased to know that after all that money has been spent, the silhouette of the observatory -- famous worldwide thanks to its use as a film location -- will not have changed. No modern structures will litter the lawn, as all new construction has been placed underground or below the sightlines of the original building and its domes, thrusting like a vision from an old Flash Gordon movie above Los Feliz.

Restoration has been supervised by Brenda Levin & Associates, responsible for such celebrated projects as the Bradbury Building and the Wiltern Theatre. Architect Pfeiffer Partners (whose principals worked on the library, City Hall and LACMA) drew up the subterranean expansion -- which will offer some faint echoes of the classic lines, albeit in reinforced concrete instead of travertine marble.

‘The universe is theatrical’

ED KRUPP did not always see himself as a showman. In fact, when he began working at the Griffith as an earnest grad student in the early 1970s, he saw his temporary job as a distraction from serious astronomical work. “I was giving the planetarium show, and I was moaning about it to my friends. You started with school programs, 600 children at a time. I had a certain number of catastrophes, and I remember talking to people and saying, ‘I really don’t like it, it’s just show business.’ But after one or two months, I was saying, ‘You know what, this is show business!’ and I was kind of hooked.”

He’s been known to don a wizard outfit and hold ceremonies during a lunar eclipse to chase away the dragon eating the moon.

“The universe is theatrical,” says Krupp. “It is hard to turn your head toward anything that happens in ‘life, the universe and everything,’ and not see this very theatrical aspect to it. Theatricality does something to our brains, and it’s not a useless process. It’s actually part of the way humans adapt to a new environment.”

By “new environment” he means the universe we began to occupy when Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969. Since then, he notes, we have begun seeing the sky not as lights and motion but as “landscapes, as real places.” At the same time, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, it dawned on humanity that far from being at the center of the universe, we occupy a smallish world, circling a medium-sized star now drifting along the edge of a minor galaxy composed of a hundred-plus billion equally interesting stars.

The design of the new Griffith will try to re-create that disturbing shift in perspective. Upstairs, the visitor will be aware of the historic grace of the classic building -- its marble columns and formal spaces -- and exhibits will focus on the sky as we have always perceived it from Earth: seasons, lunar phases, eclipses.

But as visitors pass down into the new “Richard and Lois Gunther Depths of Space,” exhibits will attempt to move them out into the expanding universe. Here a statue of Albert Einstein will sit on a park bench and hold up his own index finger to demonstrate the scale of the Big Picture.

Along the way, visitors will pass along a glass corridor offering the history of time since the big bang as a series of events “highlighted in jewels” or dine in a new “Cafe at the End of the Universe,” operated by Wolfgang Puck and cut into the western hillside to offer a stunning view toward the Hollywood sign.

The Samuel Oschin Planetarium has begun to look nearly functional, although this afternoon the dome has been illuminated with only a set of prosaic work lights. Standing inside, Krupp assures us it will be the first to feature both full-dome laser imaging and a custom-built, $3.25-million Zeiss Universarium Mark IX star projector, which will begin each show by rising dramatically out of a trapdoor on a new, $750,000 lift. When it’s switched on, all the seams in the new dome, he hopes, will disappear.

Seating has been halved to an intimate 300 -- and unlike other major planetariums -- such as the Hayden in New York, where taped narration from celebrities including Tom Hanks has become the norm -- the Oschin will continue to use a live presenter.

“People always say, ‘Couldn’t you get Leonard Nimoy?’ ” laughs Lombardo, “but we believe in a personal connection with a live presenter.” (Nimoy and his wife, Susan, have nevertheless contributed $1 million, partly to fund the “Leonard Nimoy Event Horizon,” a new underground theater and lecture hall.)

The planetarium show will use local talent including Andrew Hofman, an animator for “Van Helsing” and “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow,” and Andre Bormanis, a writer for “Star Trek: Voyager.” They hope to take the audience through prehistoric notions of the sky, bring them to stand with Ptolemy on his patio, and then enter the golden age of astronomy as laser imaging transforms the planetarium into the Mt. Wilson Dome, which should “open” with a satisfying clang. From there, we’ll zoom out among the galaxies and return by swooping over the lawn and landing back inside the cozy confines of the Griffith.

Or at least that’s the current plan; the show is still in production. And despite the hot technology, Lombardo promises that planetarium tickets will stay “below movie prices.” And as specified by Col. Griffith, admission to the building will remain free.

N.Y.’s sphere of influence

THE biggest event in the recent history of astronomical museums was probably the 2000 opening of the Rose Center for Earth and Space in Manhattan, which suspended the Hayden Planetarium as a sphere in the center of a spectacular glass cube fronting Central Park. Planets float ethereally, and visitors can adapt to changing perspectives of the universe by walking down a long spiral ramp that takes them from the big bang to a single human hair, the width of which represents the cumulative history of humankind. At night, the Rose glows like a futuristic aquarium for the solar system.

Although comparisons with leading institutions such as the Rose, Chicago’s Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum and Oakland’s Chabot Space & Science Center are inevitable, Krupp tries hard to define a distinct mission for the Griffith -- and can’t quite keep a competitive note out of his voice.

“When New York set out to rebuild the Hayden,” he says, “it had two primary objectives. No. 1 was an architectural statement in Manhattan. No. 2 was to increase the attendance at the [attached] Natural History Museum by a million persons a year.” Here Krupp smiles: “New York being what it is, they named it the Rose Center. Just as New York perceives the universe as gravitating towards it and radiating back out, so the Rose is a center of astronomy with a mission to disseminate information. They’ve had some extraordinary successes, and we would not be talking about some of what we’re doing, particularly in planetarium show production and digital animation, had New York not taken this very courageous leap.”

On the other hand, some visitors to the Rose feel that, as Gold put it, “The use of the building was just bowled over by its architects.” The huge glass walls make it impossible to control lighting, and much of the interior space has proven awkward and unusable for exhibits -- which visitors can find wordy and confusing.

“Chicago’s Adler, on the other hand, has the most extraordinary collection of antique astronomical instruments and books,” continues Krupp, “so they have always called themselves a museum.”

When he sat down with the original delegation of Angelenos, says Jonathan Alger, lead designer with C&G;, “We eventually realized that the unique DNA of the Griffith lay in that word ‘observatory’ ” -- a place where things are seen rather than described. It was Alger who first encouraged FOTO to minimize scientific exposition. “A lot of what we try to do in the medium of public space is less about what things are, and more about how they’ll be remembered. We want to create something out of the ordinary ... something you have to make a pilgrimage to go and find.”

Will Earth and sky always find a place to meet up on Mt. Hollywood? Back in his temporary office, Krupp leans forward across his desk: “I think the Griffith passed a historically vulnerable point somewhere in the 1960s and 1970s, when people figured that everything old was silly and said things like, ‘Why don’t we just cut this thing off at the knees and start over?’ But I think the real answer to the question can be found at Disney’s California Adventure, where a mural imagines Los Angeles some 500 years from now.

“In that mural, you can spot only one recognizable landmark found in the Los Angeles of today, and that’s the Griffith. I think that demonstrates the unique spot it occupies in our imaginations. The observatory may see lean times again, someday in the future, but I think we have ensured its survival for at least a century. That’s not bad; that’s getting into the cathedral department.”

Contact Marc Porter Zasada at calendar.letters @latimes.com.