The Academy Museum, LACMA, a revamped tar pits and the Purple Line — Miracle Mile is facing major changes. But for pedestrians life will be much the same.
An aerial rendering of Peter Zumthor's planned LACMA building, center, with Renzo Piano's Academy Museum theater .
To the east, if all goes according to plan, will be the new LACMA, designed by Peter Zumthor, which will not only rise off the ground on pilotis, it will reach south across Wilshire, creating a bridge over the boulevard. Across a side street from the Metro station, a new sidewalk plaza at 5900 Wilshire, the 32-story tower that bears the SBE logo, will offer pedestrians a place to sit and gather.
"It's making the Miracle Mile a miracle again," says Terry Karges, executive director of the Petersen Automotive Museum, which has inhabited the refurbished Ohrbach's department store building on the southeast corner of Wilshire and Fairfax since the 1990s.
Certainly, the current experience is — to be kind — underwhelming. Walk east on Wilshire from Fairfax to Curson Avenue, particularly on the south side of the boulevard, and you will find long stretches of sidewalk without shade and an insufficient number of street crossings. On the north side of Wilshire, Chris Burden's"Urban Light" sculpture beckons crowds to the LACMA campus; on the south side, a barren sidewalk outside the Craft Contemporary museum sits empty.
"The domain of the street itself, the public right of way, it's a multidepartmental domain," notes Craig Weber, principal city planner at the Department of City Planning."It's fundamentally the Department of Public Works — they have multiple bureaus — and the Department of Transportation."
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