Los Angeles County Museum Of Science
Huff + Gooden Architects have been selected as lead design architects and HGA Architects and Engineers (HGA) as the executive architect for the expansion and renovation of the California African American Museum (CAAM), located in Exposition Park. The $67.3 million project will include 77,000 square feet of new construction, as well as a renovation of 26,000 square feet of the existing museum. The project has completed the design phase and is awaiting funding for future phases of work.
Huff + Gooden is in charge of the architectural design and managing the design process throughout all project phases. In addition to serving as the executive architect, HGA will handle museum planning, project management, construction documents and construction administration. Huff + Gooden Architects will lead the architectural design through all project phases.
“The expansion will help provide a higher level of visibility for CAAM within Exposition Park,” said James Matson, AIA, vice president and director of HGA’s Los Angeles office. “At the same time, the renovation will preserve the design legacy of the original African American architect.”
Exposition Park also is home to the California Science Center, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
Ray Huff and Mario Gooden are leading the design efforts for the project team. Joining Matson, the project manager, on HGA’s team are Michael F. Ross, FAIA, Principal; Gary Reetz, Fine Arts Specialist; and Jason Linn, Project Coordinator. The team will work with Charmaine Jefferson, Executive Director of CAAM, and Dianna C. Brown, Project Director for the Department of General Services, Real Estate Services Division, Project Management Branch to implement the design.
Additional consultants include Englekirk & Sabol, structural engineer; IBE Consulting Engineers, MEP; KPFF, civil engineer; and Hood Design with Katherine Spitz Associates, landscape architects.
About HGA Architects and Engineers:
HGA is an integrated architecture, engineering and planning firm that helps prepare its clients for the future. The nationally recognized firm has developed expertise in the arts, community, higher education, healthcare, corporate, and science/technology industries since 1953. Visit www.HGA.com.
About HUFF + GOODEN ARCHITECTS:
Ray Huff and Mario Gooden formed Huff + Gooden Architect as a practice dedicated to the design and exploration of architecture and its relationship to culture and knowledge. The firm has offices in New York and Charleston, South Carolina. Visit www. huffgooden.com
About the California African American Museum:
The California African American Museum (CAAM) researches, collects, preserves and interprets for public enrichment the history, art and culture of African Americans. more information on the California African American Museum visit www.caamuseum.org.
Guest curator Charlotte Eyerman, formerly on staff at the Getty, emphasizes early work by artists who showed at the Natural History Museum before coming to later prominence, including John Baldessari, Robert Irwin, Ed Ruscha and more. A perhaps surprising number are women: Ynez Johnston, Helen Lundeberg, Betye Saar and June Wayne. Many had been selected for the "Annual Exhibition, Artists of Los Angeles and Vicinity," a juried show open to anyone.
Modernity is a ruin in many of the earliest works -- Warshaw's skull; his painting of wrecked automobiles that look like something from the ancient battlefields of Troy; the Cubist-tinged medieval armor in Rico Lebrun's 1948 gouache, "Study for a Soldier;" Johnston's 1949 sunken ship encased in a womb-like oval; Wayne's 1950 lithograph of paleolithic scratchings on a cave's wall. American art in the aftermath of the war was filled with ruminations on mortality.
Artists faced a terrible dilemma, the world having been brought to the brink and humanity's unspeakable capacity for evil having been laid bare. It was time to wipe the modern slate clean and start over. What better place for that than Los Angeles, a new city without much recorded history but with a growing habit of looking forward?
Unfortunately this small show -- just 27 works, four on paper -- has no catalog, although the tightly written object-labels are informative. But the clean-slate context does frame examples from the museum's one great traveling exhibition of contemporary L.A. art. "Four Abstract Classicists" in 1959, featuring geometric color-abstraction by Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley and especially John McLaughlin, would be unthinkable without the artists' determination to equate classicism with clarity.
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, 900 Exposition Blvd., (213) 763-3466, through Jan. 15. Open daily. www.nhm.org
RELATED:
Art review: "Glenn Ligon: America" at LACMA
Art review: "Monet/Lichtenstein: Rouen Cathedrals" at LACMA
Art review: 'Under the Big Black Sun' at MOCA
-- Christopher Knight
@twitter.com/KnightLAT
Photos, from top: Howard Warshaw, "Cat's Skull," 1946, charcoal, ink and chalk. Credit: Natural History Museum.
NHM rotunda. Credit: Christopher Knight/Los Angeles Times
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