Museum tower’s design in the air

A very preliminary and completely unofficial model depicting a new high-rise home for the Orange County Museum of Art made an appearance Thursday morning in a Costa Mesa hotel ballroom. For the moment the museum, to be built next to the Orange County Performing Arts-center, resembles a lipstick -- but that’s only the conception of an anonymous model-maker.

“It’s just a place holder” until the museum gets around to deciding how its building should look, said Anton Segerstrom, a partner in C.J. Segerstrom & Sons, the development company led by his father, Henry, that has been instrumental in creating Costa Mesa’s arts and shopping district.

The Segerstrom company created the model shown at Thursday’s event, a conclave for municipal planners during which Henry Segerstrom and Costa Mesa officials accepted a statewide award from the American Planning Assn. for their vision for the district, including the new museum.

This year, city officials approved five high-rise residential developments in the district -- among them an 80-unit, 300-foot-tall condo tower rising above a museum that would occupy the lower three or four floors.

It has long been understood that the Orange County Museum of Art, limited by its cramped quarters in Newport Beach, would like to make the Costa Mesa site its new abode by claiming 140,000 square feet of space in the building.

However, Dennis Szakacs, the museum’s director, said this week that, after two years of planning, it was still too soon for him to speak publicly about the museum’s plans for choosing an architect or paying for the project. Anton Segerstrom said he expected the museum would team with an experienced residential developer.

Such a project would have art-world precedents. The Seattle Art Museum recently partnered with Washington Mutual Bank on a high-rise that’s a museum on the lower stories and an office tower upstairs. In 1984, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City partly financed an expansion by selling air rights for a 588-foot condo tower built atop the museum, and it continues to receive a share of the property taxes the condos generate.

“It’s a complicated project with a lot of moving parts,” Szakacs said in declining to comment on the Orange County museum’s plans. “It’s really exciting, it’s really great, but the timing of public announcements can have major effects on the success of a project.”

Szakacs said the museum had researched how other cultural institutions have worked with private developers.

Henry Segerstrom, who gave the municipal planners a keynote speech on how Costa Mesa’s arts and shopping district has evolved over the last 40 years, said afterward that the first step toward adding a museum would be for OCMA to take ownership of the 1.6 acres he designated for a museum in 1999.

The Segerstrom family donated the property to the Orange County Performing Arts-center with the understanding that it was for safekeeping until a museum could be launched. Although his company intends to build a high-rise hotel and condominium building in the district, Segerstrom said that the company wouldn’t be involved as a developer of the museum tower.

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mike.boehm@latimes.com