The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is the largest museum in the United States devoted to the art, science, and craft of moviemaking. The culmination of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ decades-long ambition to build the world’s premier film museum, the Academy Museum’s building had an equally long first act as the May Company building. The Los Angeles Conservancy has called the 1939 retail landmark “the grandest example of Streamline Moderne architecture remaining in Los Angeles.” The building is also an officially designated City of Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument.

Designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Renzo Piano, the Academy Museum is made up of two connected buildings at the northeast corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue. The northernmost structure is the entirely new glass and concrete sphere building. At 45,000 square feet, the building houses the state-of-the-art David Geffen Theater and the Dolby Family Terrace, an open-air promenade that sits below a glass dome and offers sweeping views of the city. To the south, the main museum building occupies the completely restored 250,000-square-foot May Company building. Linked to the sphere building by glass bridges and renamed the Saban Building in honor of benefactors Cheryl and Haim Saban, the museum structure features six completely remodeled floors of exhibition galleries, education and special event spaces, the Ted Mann Theater, a conservation studio, a restaurant and café, and a store.

The original May Company building was designed by Albert C. Martin Sr., who also designed Sid Grauman’s Million Dollar Theater and Los Angeles City Hall. For decades, the department store was the westernmost anchor of the Miracle Mile, the strip of Wilshire between Highland and Fairfax Avenues. It was also home to the era’s other grand retail brands like Coulter's, Desmonds, Mullen & Bluett, Myer Siegel, and Silverwood's.

Courtesy of Bison Archives photographs collected by Marc Wanamaker, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Like many Golden Age Hollywood productions, Miracle Mile was a carefully constructed and unified work. Developer A.W. Ross had a singular vision for a shopping district organized around the automobile rather than the pedestrian; he allegedly decreed that all of the district’s buildings come with large parking lots and facades striking enough to make an impression through a windshield. In the case of the May Company building, that meant long horizontal lines, curves suggesting aerodynamic design, and an iconic golden cylinder covered in 350,000 hand-blown and hand-cut glass mosaic tiles backed with 24-karat gold foil. Over the next 90 years, many of those tiles would crack, with dull-colored, machine-made tiles replacing the damaged pieces in 1968 and 1991. But the renovations for the Academy Museum saw over 200,000 tiles replaced by hand-crafted pieces backed in gold and sourced from their original Italian manufacturer, Orsoni.