Stepping Up to a Roomier Interior

The Petersen Automotive Museum, aiming to widen its audience while adding exhibition space, a ground-floor restaurant and a fourth-floor ballroom, has chosen Los Angeles architects Keating/Khang to redesign its home at Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue.

Architect Richard Keating said the goal of the project, which has an estimated cost of between $23 million and $28 million, is to create an environment that not only holds more cars, but serves as a stage for “vintage cars, beautiful clothes and beautiful people.” His plans call for enclosing much of the existing building behind a new glass facade and adding a gently sloping tent in back, which will cover 40,000 square feet atop an existing parking structure.

But museum officials, who on April 30 selected Keating/Khang, say the design’s most significant element may be its expansion of the fourth floor. That 45,000-square-foot space will house a ballroom for banquets and parties--rental uses that are a key source of revenue for the museum. The new fourth floor will accommodate groups as large as 900, officials said, while the new restaurant, along Fairfax on the ground floor, would seat 70 to 80 diners.

Overall, the plan adds about 80,000 square feet to a 200,000-square-foot building. The Keating/Khang design is possible, in part, because the building was engineered 40 years ago to accommodate additions to its upper floors.

To pay for that and create an endowment fund for the 8-year-old institution, museum officials said, they will launch a $75-million fund-raising campaign in the next few months. Bruce Meyer, the museum board’s chairman for the last two years, said he would share that responsibility with a new co-chairman, Peter Mullin, and that they have no formal financial commitments to the campaign yet.

Keating said he and managing partner Bonnie Khang intend to finalize designs by the end of 2002, hoping that an 18-month construction phase can be completed by the end of 2004. Though details are yet to be decided, officials said they expect most of the museum to remain open during the expansion and redesign.

The museum’s six trustees chose Keating/Khang from a field of six invited competitors, all with Los Angeles offices. The other competitors were Jerde Partnership International; AC Martin Partners; Bruce Becket; Gensler; and Mark Whipple of Russell Group.

Keating, raised in Orinda, is no newcomer to California car culture, having attended vintage car events for nearly four decades, beginning with the 1954 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, where Keating’s father, William, won a best-in-class prize for his Ferrari. Keating’s own garage holds a BMS motorcycle, a Mercedes coupe, a Porsche and a 1934 MG Brooklands Racer (with right-hand drive) from England.

His other projects include the 55-story Gas Company Tower in downtown Los Angeles and the 1-million-square-foot Korea Development Bank headquarters building in Seoul. Renovations include Fresno Yosemite International Airport and the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Tennessee.

The central logistical challenge of the Petersen project, Keating said, is also the challenge of Los Angeles: to create an environment friendly to both cars and pedestrians. Inside the museum, that means making sure vehicles to be exhibited can move easily among four levels via ramps and elevators. (As now configured, the museum can move cars only on its first and second levels, and has used a crane to place vehicles for display on its fourth-floor pavilion.)

Beyond that, museum officials say they’re counting on Keating to make the museum’s exterior more inviting to the thousands of drivers and passengers who daily pass its location at Fairfax and Wilshire.

Built as a 160,000-square-foot Seibu department store in the 1960s, then bought by another department store and expanded by 40,000 square feet in the 1970s, the building was taken over the automotive museum in 1994.

Its exterior now is painted masonry and black glass, punctuated on its Fairfax side by a brightly colored race car on an outdoor pedestal. The museum’s collection includes about 275 vehicles, of which about 150 are displayed.

The Petersen museum operated for six years under the aegis of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. After its early years were marred by shaky finances, the institution became independent in 2000 when founding benefactors Robert E. and Margie Petersen contributed $24.8 million to pay off debts and buy its building.

The museum counts a membership of about 1,800 (each contributing $50 yearly or more), a staff of 28, an annual budget of about $3.2 million, an annual attendance of about 200,000--figures that museum officials expect will grow as the museum’s space grows.

Mullin said he expects the museum’s expansion to attract more loans and donations from car collectors seeking venues for their collections.

Keating and Khang said the idea of a parking structure tent arose only about 10 days ago, and wasn’t inspired by architect Rem Koolhaas’ proposal for the neighboring Los Angeles County Museum of Art. That plan calls for a Mylar tent over the museum’s four central buildings. However, noted Mullin, “we’re certainly thinking about how these museums are going to bounce off each other, and complement each other.”