Gehry Is Designing a Museum for Santa Monica

Rendering of museum in Ocean Avenue Project. Gehry Partners

Santa Monica City Council has approved the Frank Gehry-designed Ocean Avenue Project, a long-planned residential and retail development that now includes an art museum. A Gehry-designed museum in the architect's home town would seem to be a big deal, yet details are sketchy. Gehry Partners says the museum will present "world-class exhibitions" and some of Gehry's own work. Not said is who's running this museum, who's paying for it, and even what its name will be.

In the 1980s Gehry designed Edgemar, a complex on Main Street, as the original home of the Santa Monica Museum of Art. But that institution moved to Bergamot Station and then to downtown L.A., where it now operates as the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. 

Rendering of 12-story residential tower, Ocean Avenue Project. Gehry Partners