Zoltan Pali exits academy museum project as construction phase nears

Zoltan Pali, one of the architects hired to work on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' future museum, has left the high-profile project.

The departure, which the academy is characterizing as a routine transition, comes in the midst of some critiques of primary architect Renzo Piano's design, in particular a spherical theater at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue that Piano calls "the spaceship."

Pali, of the Culver City firm Studio Pali Fekete Architects, did not return calls for comment Monday. He had been working with Piano at the former May Co. building on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art campus, where the academy is scheduled to break ground on its $300-million, 290,000-square-foot museum later this year, with a planned opening in 2017.

As the project shifts from the design to the construction phase, the academy has decided to hire a local executive architecture firm to carry out Piano's design, said Bill Kramer, managing director, academy museum and external relations.

"It was simply a decision based on the timing of the project and a desire to bring in a specialist to do this work," Kramer said Monday.

The academy will name the L.A. architecture firm in the coming days, after contracts are signed, Kramer said.

In April the academy named Kerry Brougher, who spent 14 years as a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, as director of the museum, which will include galleries, movie theaters and education space devoted to the art of cinema.

Pali, who recently transformed the Beverly Hills Post Office into the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, was already working on a renovation of the 1939 May Co. building when the academy decided in 2012 to place its long-discussed movie museum there and bring on Piano, a winner of the Pritzker Prize, architecture's highest honor.

Piano and Pali would seem to have been an ideal partnership. Pali was such a fan of Piano's work, he named a son after him.

But last week the Architect's Newspaper reported rumors that Pali was being quietly removed from the project, and over the weekend, the Hollywood Reporter said the two architects had clashed.

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Zoltan Pali exits academy museum project as construction phase nears