Beverly Hills, California
The Museum of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills is located prominently at the corner of North Beverly Drive and Little Santa Monica Boulevard. Flooded with natural light and open to the street, this two-story building is the result of the remodel and rearrangement of an existing structure. Set between two newly glazed planes, one for each public façade, the main volume is highly visible from the sidewalk, and vice versa.
The North Beverly Drive entrance is set back from the property line in order to create a threshold at the entrance, a top-lit cylindrical lobby that is the symbolic center of the museum. The lobby affords access to the gallery, the 150-seat theater, the Radio Studio, and the Listening Room.
The information desk, the museum shop, and a multipurpose education room are on the ground floor, off the lobby. Visitors reach the second floor via a stepped ramp that penetrates the rotunda and overlooks the exhibition space, providing views of the streetscapes beyond. Here the movement system is inseparable from the viewing system as the stair culminates in the reading room on the second floor. The less public spaces are located on the third floor: the trustees’ room and the roof garden with views into the rotunda. Access to this level is by elevator or by a circumferential stair inside the top-lit space.
