Sparano + Mooney Architecture loves art and culture – and as contemporary architects in Los Angeles, we also adore examples of institutions in this great city that combine these passions and pursuits. Which is why we are crazy about the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center and the treasure trove it offers throughout its sprawling California campus. Housing an expansive collection of European paintings, drawings, sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, photography, textiles and decorative arts created from antiquity to the present, the museum serves diverse local and international audiences and continually offers groundbreaking exhibitions and programming to the public. The Getty Center’s overriding mission is to “inspire curiosity about, and enjoyment and understanding of, the visual arts by collecting, conserving, exhibiting and interpreting works of art of outstanding quality and historical importance”. Now that’s a mission we can support!
Read More“My art is about your seeing,” states the enigmatic artist James Turrell (b. 1943). Although one could argue that most art is intrinsically about the experience of the viewer “seeing” it, this is not art as we know it – art that asserts itself as a singular entity on a wall or polished concrete floor. Rather, Turrell’s art is pure, otherworldly, and intended to affect profoundly the viewer’s experience and perception when encountering the works crafted solely with light as the medium; light, not as a medium for looking at other things, but as “an architecture of space created with light”. As architects working in the American West, an area that possesses a unique quality of light, we are fascinated with Turrell and his tireless obsession with the effect that light, both celestial and manufactured, has on an occupant in a space.
Read MoreSmooth aesthetics, a razor sharp cultural focus, and the cutting edge of art, architecture and design – for those who call Los Angeles home, it might be all bright-lights-big-city, the epicenter of California cool and an endless vista of sophisticated whimsy, but we rarely stop to ponder from where this wellspring of American popular culture was sprung. As contemporary Los Angeles architects, we are constantly influenced by the legacy of SoCal pioneers such as Charles and Ray Eames, Richard Neutra, and John Lautner. But what about those who came before? Those who laid the ground work, built the infrastructure of architecture we now enjoy, and first realized the potential of this light and languid landscape; who saw a future in the mountainous backdrop and promoted a substance of architectural style to the masses who might want to go west and prosper? Thanks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which has recently digitized a large portion of its photographic design archive, we can now glimpse the nascence of the metropolis and its surrounding territory.
Read More