MoCA - Museum of Contemporary Art

“For twenty years of my professional career as an architect, I believed that architecture could be cultivated through irony.
This may smell of treason.
However, it allows for creating critical architecture.
It can shamelessly favor vulgarity over nobility, the worldly over the sacred.
It was an unfulfilled wish, a sorrow for something lost—
Hiroshima, the Holocaust
A bridge across the gap—
A style of wit, a sense of humor and paradoxes was accepted.
After twenty years of practical experience, I am now preparing to find a method to create architecture without irony.”

MoCA is Isozaki's first building on the territory of the United States. MoCA is situated on Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles and is the only institution exclusively dedicated to art from 1940 to the present. MoCA was one of the pilot buildings of the California Plaza project, which is still ongoing and aims to create a complete city center (culture, commerce, administration, housing). The museum today occupies three buildings throughout LA.
Isozaki's building resembles two masses with a courtyard in the middle, which is also divided into two parts - an upper one for occasional sculpture exhibitions and a lower entrance courtyard. The composition of primary geometric shapes stands on a dark granite pedestal. The remaining exterior surfaces are clad in red sandstone and diagonally placed green aluminum panels. The semi-cylindrical form on legs conceals a library and symbolically represents a gateway to the museum. Beneath it is hidden a cube with ticket sales and information. Daylight enters the gallery through glass pyramids on the roof (12 pyramids and 12 linear skylights). The atmosphere of the exhibition spaces is created by different room sizes and various lighting methods. In addition to 2250 m² of exhibition space, the museum also features an auditorium, a library, the Patinette restaurant (headed by Joachim Splichal), a café, and a gift shop.