Wiscombe and Gilmore plan museum in Los Angeles' historic district.

THE NEW MUSEUM WILL INCLUDE A ROOFTOP SCULPTURE GARDEN AND CAFE.COURTESY TOM WISCOMBE ARCHITECTURE

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. Gilmore, founder of Gilmore Associates, who has been a major player in the resurrection of the Bank District, calls the project “insanely organic.”

Designs are in the preliminary conceptual stages, but as of now visitors enter through the Fourth Street frontage of the Hellman Building and then proceed on a circuitous route through the Hellman, the Farmers and Merchants Bank, and the Bank House Garage. Treasures along the way include inter-connected basements containing more than half a dozen old bank vaults; large openings cut through walls and floors to give visual and pedestrian access from one space to the next (and to create what Wiscombe calls “three dimensional public space” in the cramped basements); and preserved treasures like old pneumatic tubes, submarine doors, and old mechanical equipment.

“It will be an underground museum in every sense of the word,” explained Gilmore, who added that the institution’s unusual architecture and art will evolve as the endeavor progresses. “There’s something beautiful about all the messiness,” he said....Continue Reading

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