Arch @ Ban's Nomadic Museum Opens in Santa Monica

After spending much of last spring in New York, Japanese Architect Shigeru Ban’s Nomadic Museum, a temporary art exhibition space, opened on January 14 next to Santa Monica, California’s historic pier. The museum contains a traveling show called Ashes and Snow, featuring large-scale photographic works by artist Gregory Colbert.

The museum is composed of 152 steel cargo containers stacked and secured in a checkerboard pattern 34 feet-high. The exhibition was packed into 12 of those containers as it traveled from New York. The remaining containers were borrowed in Santa Monica, along with recycled paper tubes for the roof and reusable wooden planks, and gravel and sand for the floor. Most of these elements will be recycled after the show.

The Santa Monica Nomadic Museum design team includes Ban, who is the principal architect; Gensler, the associate architect; the RMS Group, the general contractor, and Arup, the structural engineer. The 56,000-square-foot museum will be disassembled and then reconstructed as the show travels to other destinations including Tokyo, Berlin, and Paris. The Santa Monica exhibition will be on display through May 14.
This iteration of the museum will include a large column-free theater space and a bookstore made entirely of paper. The theater will continuously show a film by Colbert. Varying sizes of stackable cardboard tubing serve as stools for visitors watching the film.

@archrecord.construction.com+Sam Lubell