Academy Museum of Motion Pictures

Most museums about movies feel like an afterthought bolted to a Hollywood gift shop. The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is the opposite: a Renzo Piano building serious enough to stand on Wilshire Boulevard next to LACMA and hold its own. It opened to the public on September 30, 2021.

Project Scope

The $482 million project runs about 300,000 square feet across two linked structures. The Saban Building, a careful restoration and adaptive reuse of the 1939 May Company department store, holds roughly 250,000 square feet of galleries, theaters and education space. Connected to it is the Sphere Building, a 45,000-square-foot orb of concrete and glass that houses the 1,000-seat David Geffen Theater under a domed roof. Renzo Piano Building Workshop led the design with Gensler as executive architect and Buro Happold on engineering. MATT Construction served as general contractor, threading new construction into a historic shell without losing either.

Why It Matters

The build is a lesson in joining old and new. Restoring a streamline-moderne landmark while grafting a free-standing spherical theater onto it is a hard structural and preservation problem, and the result reads as one coherent place rather than a collision. It belongs to a wave of ambitious cultural construction reshaping skylines and arts districts, alongside projects like the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art and the Grand Egyptian Museum. For Los Angeles, a city that makes films but never properly housed their history, the museum filled an obvious gap with real architectural weight.

Project Team & Details