denny Architectural Art & Design

Central Los Angeles Area High School #9 offers core education for grades 9-12 as well as courses in the visual arts, performing arts, music, and dance. To do justice to its mission as a public institution, the school campus also incorporates a public theater that seats nearly 1000 visitors, a facility which has previously been missing in the cultural offering of downtown Los Angeles. The school for approximately 1800 pupils is organized into four academies and comprises seven buildings: the theater building, library, cafeteria, and four classroom buildings—one for each of the artistic disciplines taught here. The design concept was to employ architectural signs to communicate the Los Angeles community's commitment to art. The point of departure for the urban arrangement of the buildings was the central and visually exposed location of the site, divided from Grand Avenue only by the 101 Freeway—one of the most heavily traveled roads to pass through the downtown area of Los Angeles. Through the four classroom buildings, the master plan sets out an orthogonal arrangement that obtains additional spatial tension through the three special buildings for the library, lobby, and theater tower.

Gorgeous architecture, Amazing vistas of LA, extraordinary gardens and landscape architecture, and an art collection from classical antiquity to contemporary photography and multi-media installations, the Getty Museum is by far the best art museum (and cultural center) on the West Coast. Nestled in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, the J. Paul Getty Trust commissioned architect Richard Meier in the late 1990s to build a remarkable campus to exhibit art, facilitate innovative research, and assemble a public space for visitors from around the world to gather and appreciate the creative side of human kind. A commission of a lifetime, the Getty Museum's budget was approximately .2 billion, with the remainder of the art trust at around .0 billion, demonstrating a greater perspective on the priorities in life and culture. The architectural modernism of Meier shows influences of such 20th century visionaries as Le Corbusier. It is said that Meiers sat on the site before designing his master plan so that he could orient the axises and find the most effective site lines along with seeing how the light changes in the course of a day. The bright travertine stone imported from Italy and the broad, volume-metric grid contrast dramatically with the rich blue, Southern California sky. The collection includes such masters as Van Gogh, Monet, Manet, Gauguin, Degas, and secondary artists of the Renaissance, Romantics, Baroque, illuminated manuscripts from the middle ages ...