LA BREA TAR PITS MUSEUM

Team: Chang Liu and Zachary Slonsky

Role: conceptual, formal, programmatic and aesthetic development

Critic: Curtis Roth Autumn 2019

The project is to reconsider the design of the existing La Brea Natural History Museum on Los Angeles’ Miracle Mile. The site was originally used for oil extraction when it was discovered to sit atop one of the world’s largest deposits. The lands altered to accomodate this new program, and would continue to evolve as the population boomed in a liquid gold rush. Suburban houses would spring up amongst the field of oil drills, paths would be drawn in asphalt, and the extraction process would in turn lead to another discovery: fossilized remains dating back to the Pleistocene Epoch.

The same forces that produced the density and wealth of Los Angeles led to the research and cataloging of the world’s largest record of Ice Age ecology. The site has held many identities, each a representation of forces larger than itself.

Today, mounds of artificially irrigated infill cover the lake of asphalt that would visible otherwise. Our team responds to this, working under the premise that the landscape of the site is equally as fabricated as the urban architecture. As such, we treat the parkscape and museum as two parts of the same system, each manifesting to accommodate for local desires. Broader circulation paths overlay atop these local genuflections, producing a "thick 2-d" that tries to architecturally respond to the sites many ambitions.

The integrated ground approach avoids the dominating narratives of monolithic architectures, and gives space to the sites varied constituencies: the scientist, the museum visitor, and the general public.

The formal strategy for this system starts at the scale of the site and works its way inward. First, four hotspots were created on the site to produce density, two in the middle, one for each side entry.

Primary axes run between these hotspots, with tributaries branching outward. These lines produce unbalanced four-sided geometries. Some lines extend past the boundary of a single shape, producing broader relationships. The network of lines is designed to regulate the scale and figurality of the building and landscape, contrasts are controlled through this system.

Each geometry is coded as one of the following programs: public park, museum park, plaza, building, and tarpit. Plazas are placed between entry points and landscape units. Paths connect these geometries, forming as an offset of the edge. Paths produce not only the circulation, but the interior space in general, using their variable thickness and slope to platform exhibition space and drive sectional relationships.

West Pavillion:

The western part of the building houses the most active tarpits and corresponding research labs. This area gives the scientists the most privacy, with the public only getting a glipse of the activity during their passthrough.

Main Exhibition Space:

Located at the center, this unit mixes the varying constituencies through shared programs and sectional segregations. Non-paying visitors can go to the theatre, restaurant, giftshop, and have view of the tar pits, allowing participation independent of class.

South Entrance:

This portion connects the geological aesthetics of the park to the modernized stretch of the miracle mile. It’s the face of the building, and contains the museum’s administrative brain. Fundraising and admissions are managed here.

The user types scientist, administrator, park visitor, and museum visitor each produce specific relationships to one another and to the museum. To us, the museum is the performance of institutionalized knowledge. Our design posits the scientist as a performance artist, capturing the attention of curious minds through the ritual of their tasks. This voyeurism promotes education by motivating participation, with the exhibitions, presentations, and eventually perhaps as a collegue. As museum patrons observe, the collective public upon the parkscape observes them, fostering a curiousity and participation of their own. Perhaps ambivilent passersby would drift to the many free access zones of the site, or perhaps they'll be motivated to return with a ticket in hand. To whatever degree of commitment, this architecture is meant to house them, and to connect this profound scientific performance to the culture of Los Angeles.