New Art Museum to be Built in Historic Downtown Los Angeles

Photos courtesy of Courtesy Tom Wiscombe Architecture

Sam Lubin has an exclusive story over at the Architect's Newspaper of a type that would seemingly only be reported on April 1st, but which is actually true.  Old Bank District partners and developers, Tom Gilmore and Jerri Perrone, are about to start interior demolition work for an underground/first floor/rooftop museum at 4th and Main featuring contemporary Los Angeles art:

Downtown Los Angeles’s historic core is about to get its first major museum, if that’s what you want to call it. Local developer Tom Gilmore and architect Tom Wiscombe are teaming up on the complex project, which they are calling the Old Bank District Museum. It will be dedicated to contemporary Los Angeles art and located in the sub-basements, basements, ground floors, mezzanines, and roofs of three interconnected buildings along Main and Fourth streets.
“We’re going beyond the frontier of street level,” said Tom Wiscombe, principal at Tom Wiscombe Architecture and a professor at SCI-Arc.

 And...

 The museum’s collection, said Gilmore, will tilt toward the deviant, up-and-coming variety, an antidote to established museums and philanthropy in the city. It is still very much a work in progress. Gilmore said that he and his partner, Jerri Perrone, will fund the initial phases of construction and that the formation of the museum’s board has yet to commence. He hopes to begin demolition inside the buildings next month, start construction documents by next year, and complete the project by 2017.

Read the rest of the story at the Architect's Newspaper and I will update after Art Walk - and I will be pointing out the potential spaces for the museum during my weekend walking tours of Historic Downtown LA.