Projects: Cultural

Edie Cohen -- Interior Design, 12/1/2011 2:00:00 AM

Project: Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust
Location: Los Angeles

Seven years in completion, the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust stands not as a looming monument. Instead, the 32,000 square feet are mostly subterranean. That has to do not only with the site, in Pan Pacific Park, but also with Hagy Belzberg's personal ideas. Given the solemn subject, he made his $15.2 million LEED Gold design part of the park and its vibrant life without impinging on it. "The architecture is just the container," he says, going on to a historical observation. "In 1930's Europe, schoolchildren played in the parks. But nearby terrible things were happening." Though buried and almost entirely concrete, the museum is anything but a bunker. Near the entry, skylights and the translucent walls along a downward ramp let in sunshine. It progressively dims as visitors proceed. Commanding forms-complex curves and sloped ceilings-help order the circulation as well. Belzberg allows no aimless wandering. The loop completed, visitors return to brightness and the building's green roof.

Merit: H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture
Project: DiMenna Center for Classical Music
Location: New York

The concrete building contains rehearsal and recording spaces, all with acoustical envelopes of either red-oak slats or fabric-wrapped panels.

Merit: One Plus Partnership Limited
Project: Palace Cinema
Location: Shanghai

A "sky and cloud" concept takes the form of a nearly all-gray theater, white marble flooring, and amorphous Corian lavatory basins.

Merit: Rockwell Group
Project: Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
Location: New York

Splashes of orange, outside and in, serve as a beacon for the Film Society of Lincoln Center's multiscreen cinema and café.