America defined, and has been defined, by the automobile. Highway junctions, drive-in theaters, drive-through churches, automated car wash and suburbs. These are quintessentially American. The car holds one of the keys to understanding the postwar world. This is why desining a museum dedicated to automobile and automobile history, in the automobile nation, is one of the most interesting and exciting tasks one can imagine for oneself. And unlike most car museums in the world, tucked into the outskirts of cities or just squarely in the countryside, here the building is but a few meters from one of the city's most conspicuous and celebrated avenues. The building extends all the way back to the opposite street, where retail space, an office and residential tower and parking space is incorporated.
Vehicles are displayed in a a multi-lobe plan, a succession of bay windows that provides each car with a dedicated viewing space, yet without ever losing the sense of continuous space. Effect has been entrusted to the glass block skin that wraps around the three side of the building. It ensures homogeneity, a pattern against which all vehicles are displayed, as such capable of highlighting the differences in the vehicles's shape and colour. Transluscent light is at the same time adequate for viewing 3D objects and ideal for conservation purposes. Viewed from the street, the lobes scale-down the otherwise monotonous length of the building and would reflect natural light. At night the museum shines like a Japanese lantern, nuanced by the varying colours and intensities of the artificial light in each of the lobes.
At the same time the museum has its own dialogue with the neighborhood. The ground floor unapologetically breaks the American pattern of the ground floor as prime retail space. It shuns programattic efficiency. Instead the museum virtually disappears at ground level, taking up only enough space for the glassed welcome center that quickly hauls the visitor up to the first floor via sculptural elevators. The street merely continues below the resulting vast ceiling leading to an unexpected and unexpectedly lush and tropical garden courtyard.
