LACMA SUPPORTS MEASURE R; GEHRY PARTNERS TO MOVE
The most recent list of donors to the Measure R campaign in Los Angeles was released late yesterday afternoon and topping the list was a four-hundred-thousand-dollar contribution from the Los Angeles Museum County of Art, reports the Los Angeles Times. Measure R proposes to raise the sales tax in Los Angeles County by a half cent to pay for more mass transit and road projects. LACMA also gave five hundred thousand dollars earlier this month. The museum sits at the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax, and if the subway is extended west, as Measure R proposes to do, LACMA would be right next to a stop. Melody Kanschat, president of the museum, says: “The reason we’re supporting this is obvious. We think the cultural infrastructure in LA really can’t realize its full potential without an investment in transportation infrastructure.” Kanschat says that when LACMA does surveys to try to find out why people don’t visit, the top three reasons all have to do with getting there: Prospective visitors say they live too far, there’s too much traffic, and the museum is inconvenient to freeways and mass transit.
In other news, Frank Gehry and the 160 employees of the architectural firm Gehry Partners will be relocating to El Segundo, California, in early 2009, occupying a seventy-five-thousand-square-foot “campus,” reports Market Watch. Gehry Partners is currently developing the master plan for the campus and will add fifteen thousand square feet of space to the sixty thousand square feet of existing structures. Occupancy is expected in the first or second quarter of 2009. The property is located between Utah Avenue and Alaska Avenue, near Aviation Boulevard. Because of continuing growth in demand for its services, Gehry Partners has outgrown its forty-four-thousand-square-foot studio space on Beatrice Street in Los Angeles, which was also developed in partnership with NSB Associates. The El Segundo property that will be the new home of Gehry Partners includes a total of 154,000 square feet of land, providing ample parking and potential for future expansion.
