Located on Wilshire and Fairfax in Los Angeles, the museum has three primary goals: to convey the power of movies, to give viewers a behind-the-scenes look into how films are made, and to explore their impact on culture and our lives.
Renzo Piano’s design comprises two distinct buildings that form the academy museum’s 300,000-square-foot campus. The six-storey Saban building designated at Los Angeles historic-cultural monument will feature more than 50,000 square feet of exhibition galleries, a state-of-the-art education studio, a 288-seat theater, a restaurant and café, a store, and public event spaces. Meanwhile, a soaring globe-shaped addition appropriately titled ‘the sphere’ will include a 1,000-seat theater and will host a range of performances, screenings, premieres, and events. At its top, an expansive terrace will afford sweeping views of the Hollywood hills.
Occupying two floors of the Saban building, the museum will open with a long-term exhibition that explores the evolution of film. The institution has also announced a temporary exhibition dedicated to Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, which will be followed in 2020 by an exhibition that reveals the important and under-recognized history of African-American filmmakers in the development of American cinema. Meanwhile, the museum’s 34-foot-high project space will open with a major work by the Tokyo-based interdisciplinary art collective Teamlab.