LOS ANGELES, CA.- Dr. Lori Bettison-Varga, President and Director of the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County, today announced the beginning of a long-term initiative to reimagine and renovate one of the institution’s most prized components: its 12-acre campus in Hancock Park, encompassing the world-renowned La Brea Tar Pits and the George C. Page Museum.

The project for a comprehensive reimagining of this uniquely important campus will begin with the development of a creative master plan, undertaken to advance NHMLAC’s scientific research and public engagement for the next half-century. Dr. Bettison-Varga announced the inauguration of master planning at an “ideas incubator” held today at La Brea Tar Pits and the nearby El Rey Theatre, where NHMLAC convened more than seventy leading figures from the fields of science, the arts, design, entertainment, education, technology, communications, philanthropy, and government for a day of open-ended discussion that will inform and kick-start the design process.

Dr. Bettison-Varga also revealed the names of the three architect-led teams that will compete for the assignment of leading the master planning team. Dorte Mandrup (Copenhagen), WEISS/MANFREDI (New York) and Diller Scofidio + Renfro (New York) were selected through a process that began in March 2019. The three firms will develop conceptual approaches to the project, which NHMLAC will unveil for public comment in late August 2019. On the basis of its own review and the public’s feedback, NHMLAC expects to announce its chosen firm toward the end of 2019. The firm will then lead a multi-disciplinary creative team through a public engagement, master planning, design and construction process over the next several years.

Dr. Bettison-Varga said, “La Brea Tar Pits and the Page Museum are the only facilities of their kind in the world—an active, internationally renowned site of paleontological research in the heart of a great city, and a museum that both supports the scientists’ work and helps interpret it for more than 400,000 visitors a year. We are excited to seize this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to not just renovate these facilities thoroughly but also to think deeply about how to make them function as well for neighbors and guests over the next 40 years as they have for the last 40—perhaps, even better. It’s an adventure that starts now, with the blue-sky thinking of our Ideas Incubator, and will continue with the work of three of the best architecture and design teams in the world—and the input of Angelenos as well. We look forward eagerly to seeing the concept proposals and hearing from our community.”

The Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County are a public / private partnership with the County of Los Angeles, which owns the 23 acres of Hancock Park, including the 12-acre parcel managed by NHMLAC. Los Angeles County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl said, “La Brea Tar Pits and the Page Museum are enormously popular and valuable cultural assets for the County, attracting neighbors, school children from across the metropolitan area, and visitors from around the world. The Tar Pits are known everywhere as a visual symbol of the cultural and long natural history of Los Angeles. The Board of Supervisors is proud to support this forward-thinking effort by the Natural History Museums to create a vibrant and engaging future for this exciting and important public resource.”

To reimagine La Brea Tar Pits, NHMLAC directed the architects to assemble teams that include not only architects and landscape architects, but scientists, engineers, designers and artists. The three finalists were selected based on the overall quality and character of their response to a Request for Information, their design approach, their previous experience and team strength, references and project approach.

From Copenhagen, Denmark, founder and creative director Dorte Mandrup and her team at Dorte Mandrup are known for their sensitive yet dynamic approach to culturally significant sites. Their work includes five UNESCO World Heritage Sites, ranging from a museum and visitor center by the Icefjord in Greenland, to three visitor centers by the Wadden Sea coast in Denmark, Germany and Netherlands and a library in the UNESCO protected Swedish baroque city, Karlskrona. Their team includes landscape architect Martha Schwartz Partners, visual designers Kontrapunkt, LA based executive architects Gruen Associates and engineering firm Arup.

Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, founders and principals of New York-based WEISS/MANFREDI Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism, have seamlessly married architecture and landscape in a series of landmark projects that among others includes the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the Museum of the Earth, and the renowned Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle. Their team includes brand and graphics designer Michael Beirut, paleobotanist Dr. Carol Gee, artist Mark Dion and Los Angeles-based Emmy Award-winning designer Karin Fong of Imaginary Forces.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) is well known in Los Angeles for their design of The Broad museum on Grand Avenue, which opened in 2015. Other high-profile DS+R projects include New York City’s High Line which repurposed a 1.5 mile-long elevated train track into a vibrant park; the recently opened Shed, also in New York City; and the 35-acre Zaryadye Park, Moscow’s first major public park in over 50 years. Their creative team includes California-based landscape architects Rana Creek and landscape architect and urban theorist Walter Hood.

The Campus
The only active paleontological research facility in the world that is located in a major urban area, La Brea Tar Pits is situated within the eastern portion of Hancock Park in Los Angeles’s Miracle Mile district. Since research began in 1913, the Tar Pits have yielded millions of samples, including saber-toothed cats, dire wolf and mastodon skeletons, innumerable plants, small rodents, and insects, and new discoveries are made daily in the Tar Pits open-air excavations. These collections constitute an unparalleled resource for understanding environmental change in Los Angeles, and the planet, during the last 50,000 years of Earth’s history.

The George C. Page Museum, designed by Los Angeles architects Frank Thornton and Willis Fagan, opened in 1977. Burrowed into the earth to preserve as much of the landscape as possible, it has sloping, grass-covered exterior walls, which are a beloved feature of Hancock Park, and is surmounted by a 10-foot-high, 4-sided fiberglass frieze of Ice Age landscapes, plants, and mammals, created by the sculptor Manuel Paz. The 57,000-square-foot-museum’s collections number more than 2 million specimens. Because of the building’s shape and underground siting, however, the museum is difficult to modify and expand, to the detriment of its programs in exhibition, education, research, and storage.

In addition to the Tar Pits and the museum, the campus comprises several active digs, an Observation Pit building from the 1950s (refurbished in 2014), a concession building, simulated Pleistocene landscapes, and contemporary gardens.

Over the past few years, NHMLAC has made an ongoing series of improvements and enhancements to the Tar Pits, the museum and its portion of the park. The next in the series will be an Augmented Reality experience, to be introduced in summer 2019, and installation of the Second Home Serpentine Pavilion by SelgasCano (June 28 to November 24, 2019) as a celebration of architectural design and a temporary site for free public events. The master planning process will be the beginning of an initiative to improve the entire campus, which has not been renovated comprehensively in more than fifty years.