The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, located on the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax along Los Angeles’ Museum Mile, is a museum dedicated to exhibiting the art and science of movies. Scheduled to open in 2019, the 300,000 square-foot facility will be the nation’s first, large-scale museum entirely dedicated to the art, science, craft, business, and history of movies. The museum will feature exhibits from the Academy’s collection of 12 million photographs and tens-of-thousands of posters, artifacts and other objects exhibiting the past, present, and future of the movie industry. Visitors will have the feeling that they are in a movie in immersive exhibits.
The signature architectural jewel of this new museum is glass encased spherical structure known as the David Geffen Theater. Held aloft by plinths (columns), this globe-like structure will house a state-of-the-art 1,000 seat theater and will host a range of performances, screenings, premieres, and events with world’s leading filmmakers. Located atop the glass-covered sphere would be a glass-surrounded, but not fully enclosed, event space that would offer sweeping views of the Hollywood Hills. The whole structure is being built on tar-sand.
The 150 feet diameter sphere structure stands on four concrete columns twelve feet off the ground weighing 25 million pounds (25,000 kip). Seismic isolators are provided between the columns and the sphere to allow the structure to move freely approximately 30-inches horizontally during an earthquake. The outside surface is made from precast concrete panels molded for this structure. Two feet of highly reinforced shotcrete is placed against the precast on the inside. Glass canopy mounted two feet away from the precast will be supported through penetration holes in the precast.
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