Project Description

Before the curtain rises, the building is already performing.

The Mark Taper Forum at the Los Angeles Music Center is one of the great civic architectural statements of 1960s Los Angeles — and up close, the exterior is something most people never properly see. The cylindrical form rises on pilotis above a reflecting pool, its entire upper surface wrapped in a continuous band of sculptural concrete relief. Jacques Lipchitz created the frieze — an expressionistic cascade of figures, forms, and organic shapes that circles the building in a single unbroken composition. It’s monumental public art embedded directly into the architecture, inseparable from it.

Architect Welton Becket designed the Taper as part of the original Music Center complex, and the building still holds its ground beautifully against the modern glass structures that have grown up around it. The reflecting pool below mirrors the relief work above, doubling the composition in still blue water on a clear Los Angeles morning.

Brutalism with soul. Theatre architecture that understands its own drama.