NEW HOME FOR LOS ANGELES’S A+D MUSEUM

The Architect’s Newspaper reports that, after years of nomadic existence, Los Angeles’s A+D Museum is finally getting its own home, at 6032 Wilshire Boulevard, right across the street from the Broad Contemporary Art Museum on LA’s Museum Row. The museum was created in 2001 to “celebrate and promote an awareness of architecture and design.” Now, the museum signed a six-year lease (with an additional five-year option) for its ground-floor space on April 17 and plans to occupy it in September. It left its former location on 5900 Wilshire—about two blocks east of the new space—on April 20.

Since its founding, the A+D has bounced around LA, occupying locations donated by philanthropists like developer Ira Yellin, who gave the museum its first facility in the downtown Bradbury Building in 2001. It then moved to Santa Monica in 2003, then West Hollywood, and finally to its most recent location in a large space donated by developer Wayne Ratkovich.

The new venue is on the ground floor of a small midcentury office building and will be fronted by large storefront windows and bright signage that will welcome the public more immediately than the museum’s most recent, set-back site. Design work for the raw, minimal space will be donated by Richard Meier & Partners and by Gensler. Once the build-out is complete, the museum will measure forty-eight hundred square feet, with space for offices, conference rooms, and project storage. “We see this as our next big step,” said A+D’s president, the architect Stephen Kanner. “This will allow us to have a broader outreach and more shows because of the new, stable location.”