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| Auguste Rodin, The Thinker, designed 1880 (posthumous cast, 11 out of edition of 12). Norton Simon Museum |
The Norton Simon Museum has completed its year-long exterior refresh of its building and campus. Updates include better signage; installation of Rodin's
The Thinker in a more visible spot; conservation of the museum's skin of Edith Heath tiles; reconfiguration of the lily pond, sculpture garden, and cafe seating. This time there are no starchitects involved. Architectural Resources Group helmed the update, following Frank Gehry's higher-profile revision (late 1990s) of the 1969 building by Pasadena Modernists Ladd & Kelsey.
A large cast of Rodin's The Thinker is one of the most recognizable works in the NSM collection, but few saw it in its former niche overlooking Colorado Boulevard. It's now been moved to the front of the museum, equally visible to those arriving via the parking lot or on foot.
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| Norton Simon Museum's renovated exterior, 2025. Photo: Elon Schoenholz, image (c) Norton Simon Art Foundation |
The signage has replaced an Apple-style Helvetica with a cleaner, thinner, more sophisticated font. Note the kick in the new "R." (The Wikipedia photo below exaggerates the orange shade of the facade but does record damage to the tiles, a motivation for the recent treatment.)
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| Edith Heath tiles on exterior of Norton Simon Museum |
This is what the conserved tile looks like now. Edith Heath (1911–2005) was a Bay Area studio potter and founder of
Heath Ceramics, which produced Modernist tableware as well as architectural tile. Thornton Ladd and John Kelsey tapped her to supply 115,000 brown tiles to cover their quirky Pasadena Museum. The refresh has replaced seriously damaged tiles with replacements from Heath's still-going firm, repaired other tiles as needed, and deep-cleaned the entire surface.
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| Aristide Maillol, Mountain, designed 1937, in 2025 landscape. Norton Simon Museum |
Ladd & Kelsey's sculpture garden had a rectilinear reflecting pool. In the late 1990s Nancy Goslee Power replaced that with a free-form lily pond intended to evoke Monet's garden at Giverny. (Norton Simon bought a major Monet
Water Lilies painting but sold it.) SWA, the landscape architect of the new refresh, has downsized the pond a bit and replaced its plastic lining with concrete. It's still biomorphic and has water lilies, but it's narrower and shallower, allowing more space for people and sculpture. There's a lot of green, green grass, unusual as new public gardens in the region tend to showcase drought-tolerant designs. But SWA's design includes swales, a linchpin of water-smart landscapes.
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| View from west end of pond |
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| Seating for cafe |
The cafe and its seating strike a hygge note. The hardscaping combines benches, terrazzo, rustic tiles, and gravel.
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| Hardscape flooring for cafe area |
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| Trunks of aged coral tree |
SWA keeps the magnificent wreck of a coral tree, now propped up on metal crutches, and the legacy eucalyptus that are now shunned for their flammability.
In all the update is subtle to the point of self-effacing. If you hate change, you won't find much to complain about. But if you take the time to notice, the garden—front and back—is more appealing and user-friendly than it's ever been.
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| Jacques Lipschitz, Figure, 1926–1930. Norton Simon Museum |
Comments
The article included a sentence about - and using the art scene in NYC as a comparison point - "snorting at the inferiorities" of LACMA. Or something like that. It was published around the time the LA Times now-retiring art critic started dealing with the local museum scene.
Even the museum scene in Paris or New York City back then was not as elaborate as it now is. Or pre-Pompidou/pre-D'Orsay or era of Breuer/pre-Pelli. Today's Met on 5th Ave reflects the far more demanding expectations of the public and tourists in the 21st century.
The Simon of 2025 is preferable to PAM of 1969. Even LACMA of 2026 is (or hopefully will be--if only by default) preferable to LACMA of 1965. I just hope that people like Michael Govan or George Lucas, etc, don't end up doing something that (certainly intentionally or inadvertently too) makes one pine for the past.
To my mind, Norton Simon is without peer among museums west of the Mississippi.