La Brea Tar Pits & Museum
On behalf of Suisman Urban Design
La Brea Tar Pits Museum is refreshed both inside and out
The La Brea Tar Pits site and museum, owned and operated by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, got a bright, contemporary interim renovation with a modest budget under a shortened timeline.
The bright, contemporary transformation, designed while at Suisman Urban Design and in collaboration with Kim Baer Design Associates, elegantly updated the setting for the Ice Age bones housed within the buildings. At remarkably low cost, the team was able to give these very old bones a new setting with the use of paint, lighting, signage, graphics, floor polish, and landscaping which transformed a drab relic of the earth-toned 1970s into a bright and contemporary museum space appropriate to the 2020s.
Three Tar Pits Pavilions are renovated for maximum impact on a minimal budget
Presented with the charge to improve the visitor experience and strengthen wayfinding, the team used color and graphics to unify three very different pavilions on the site, and to strengthen them as visible landmarks helping guide visitors around the campus. Closed for decades, the Observation Pit — a round, mid-century building, which originally opened in 1952 as the original tar pit museum — was restored as a sunlit pavilion that brings visitors down spiral steps to see the ice age bones of horses and camels trapped in natural asphalt. The viewing station at Pit 91, an active excavation site, with its distinctive butterfly roof got a reconfigured interior that allows for more display space while allowing visitors to look on as workers dig for fossils from a pool of naturally occurring asphalt. The Rest Area Station exterior and interior has been upgraded to feel more like a part of the building collection at the park.
