Klaus Biesenbach, the former director of MoMA PS1 in New York City, and Chief Curator at Large of MoMA, will become the new director of one of our architectural clients, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Biesenbach reveals, “It is humbling to be invited to lead a museum that has already achieved so much, and that in so many ways represents the highest aspirations of contemporary art.”
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In July of 1957, residents of Los Angeles placed a time capsule in the Fort Moore Memorial monument. Almost 60 years later to the day, a time capsule was discovered in the flag pole base during the Fort Moore Memorial Restoration project the architects at Sparano + Mooney Architecture are currently working on.
A letter from the former president of San Francisco State College, Dr. Glenn Dumke, proposed a time capsule and a list of items to be included, but it was uncertain whether this was ever done. What a great surprise to discover the time capsule existed! Staff from the Department of Public Works and the Arts Commission found the time capsule. Art Conservator, Donna Williams, says it is unclear whether the items in the capsule are the items that were originally proposed.
Read MoreWhat do a London-born sculptor, Connecticut-based/German-native artist, the Mormon Battalion of Salt Lake City, Mormon Battalion of Council Bluffs, Iowa, and our firm of Los Angeles architects have in common? The answer might surprise you: the Ft. Moore Pioneer Memorial in Los Angeles, California. As reported on the front page of the Los Angeles Times on Saturday, January 28th, 2017, thanks to generous support from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and with the technical and design team at Sparano + Mooney Architecture, the “forgotten memorial” is undergoing critical restoration to return the monument to its original civic glory.
Read MoreSound and image bleed and fuse. The viewer sees, experiences and questions. Modern hyper-mobility and the relentlessness of human existence are served up in the guise of moving pictures. Such is the entropic landscape of the art works by Doug Aitken, which will be exhibited in a mid-career retrospective at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). The show will be the first North American museum survey of Aitken’s work and will include seven large-scale video installations, a recent live sound piece and several cross-disciplinary, multimedia artworks that, in typical Aitken fashion, defy acute categorization.
Read MoreThe Studio City Recreation Center Gymnasium in Beeman Park, located in Studio City, California will be Los Angeles’s first Net-Zero Energy pilot project. Designed by Sparano + Mooney Architecture to LEED-certified specifications, the new 12,000 SF facility will be an immeasurable asset to the neighborhood and community, and will also demonstrate the feasibility of designing self-sustaining energy efficient municipal buildings. The project scope replaces an inefficient recreation building with the construction of new, state of the art modern architecture. The recreation center will include a full-size basketball court, multipurpose meeting rooms for the community, office and administration areas, a kitchen, restrooms and support facilities. The project scope also includes security lighting, a parking area, new landscaping and irrigation for the park. With a projected total construction cost of $7M, the gymnasium will be ready for public use and exceed of code requirements for Net-Zero Energy.
Read More“It’s mainly tacos and stray dogs and really nice people”, observes Sojourner Truth Parsons, a painter who occupies a light-filled loft in Los Angeles’ Boyle Heights district. Parsons is part of a new crop of achingly cool artists, designers, gallery owners, collectors and culture vultures who are moving to downtown Los Angeles and the Arts District – a cluster of forbidding, abandoned factories and warehouses, industrial spaces, parking lots, strip malls, concrete and barbed wire. The area is scrappy, desolate, and ripe for reinvention as the city’s prime arts and culture hotspot. It is also home to Sparano + Mooney Architecture where we have been based for almost 20 years.
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