AMPAS (Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences) | Los Angeles, Calfiornia | 2013

Design Architects: Studio Pali Fekete architects [SPF:a]
Original Architects: Albert C. Martin Sr. (1939)
Client: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

This is not the scheme within the "football helmet," but one that respects the entire historic 1939 Wilshire May Company building and maintains the Fairfax & Wilshire historic facades.

The entire envelope of the building is maintained and utilized for the museum.

The culture of film is not held within a theater, the communal aspect of watching a film is not 500 eyes staring at the same screen, it’s in the arcades of the movieplex before a show, it’s in the bars and coffee house nearby where movies are discussed.

Our collective experience of film takes place after the credits roll, when we turn to our date and ask them “what did you think” and it plays out for the rest of our lives as the ideas and emotions we are exposed to shape and affect how we see ourselves and the world around us.

Even films we watch on our phones are still shared and experienced collectively because the collective experience is in the digestion of the film not in the watching together. We watch alone or with our families but we discuss with everyone we know.

The museum contains theaters as we’ve come to know them where films from every era and technology can be presented as they were meant to be. But it also has a new kind of space or venue where you are enveloped in film – where there is no separation or hierarchy between wall, screen, or audience.

An immersive space that could be a new medium for filmmakers to explore. A sensory experience that engages time and space, form and content in a completely novel way. Not a place to passively sit and watch a film, but a place to come into contact with the content and artifacts and technology of film, an exploded cinema where the projectors are visible and the technology behind the screen is shown.

The filmscape creates a vertical connection between the horizontal floors of the building and allows you to orient yourself and find your way through the interior.