Academy Museum of Motion Pictures blends 1930s-era design with 2020s-era innovation

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opens Thursday after the epic restoration of the 1939-era May Company Building. Italian architect Renzo Piano married the historic Streamline Moderne department store on Wilshire Boulevard with a new concrete and glass sphere that seems to have descended from outer space.

“He’s managed to combine the old and the new in a way that reinvents the building,” says design and architecture correspondent Frances Anderton, who hopes this project will serve as a model for the future. “We have tons of buildings which could be inventively reused in that way. It holds on to memories. It creates new memories. I think it's very exciting.”