Boldface Names Give Los Angeles a New Cultural Center

[Celerity]

An OMA-designed pavilion at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple was helped along by Eli Broad. It houses Wallis Annenberg’s GenSpace, a center for older people.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/02/arts/design/wilshire-boulevard-temple-broad-annenberg.html



LOS ANGELES — On a clear December morning, Los Angeles’s greatest hits shine from the roof of the Audrey Irmas Pavilion: You can see the Hollywood sign, the Griffith Park Observatory, even a snowy Mount Baldy, all without squinting. The pavilion, a futuristic, three-story trapezoid with a wood-panelled event center, sunken garden and rooftop terrace in the center of the city, will serve Koreatown, which is among the city’s densest and most diverse neighbourhoods. It is first, though, a community space for the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, the Byzantine-Romanesque domed synagogue next to the pavilion — the final piece of the temple’s long expansion plan.



The temple’s dome was modelled after Rome’s Pantheon. It crowns the sanctuary, whose 1929 construction was supported by heavyweights like the Warner brothers, the Universal Pictures founder Carl Laemmle, and the M.G.M. co-founder Louis B. Mayer, who donated wraparound murals by the artist Hugo Ballin, coffered ceilings, a heavenly oculus and stained glass windows. But in the 2000s, as the congregation was shrinking and the grounds were degrading, some temple leaders and members thought it might make sense to sell the building.

The senior rabbi of the temple, Steven Leder, spent six years raising $120 million. By 2011, there were renovation plans for the temple from the architect Brenda Levin, and two years later, the oldest glass studio in Los Angeles, Judson, had restored the sanctuary’s neo-Gothic windows, the sculptor Lita Albuquerque had designed a memorial wall and the artist Jenny Holzer had crafted a series of benches. The pavilion was next, in an adjacent parking lot owned by the temple, but Rabbi Leder needed the right architect: a modernist who respected tradition. Enter the philanthropist Eli Broad, who reshaped this city’s cultural footprint and left its future in question after his death last year.



Broad, the billionaire developer who spent decades raising the profile of the city with his wife, Edythe, met with Rabbi Leder in 2015, a few years before retiring. Rabbi Leder said: “I asked Eli: ‘Will one of the world’s great architects design a building for a synagogue?’ He looked at me and said: ‘For that sanctuary, on Wilshire Boulevard, in Los Angeles? They’re all going to want to do it.’” So the pavilion was born. Designed by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture — the firm founded by the Pritzker Prize-winning Rem Koolhaas — the project also paved the way for another donor, Wallis Annenberg, to fulfil a longstanding vision she had for the city: for a center to help older people find community.

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