Marking a decade in grand style.

• Author: Snow, K. Mitchell
• Position: GALLERY PLACE - Museum of Latin American Art's new building

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

It's hard to get excited about tin, the traditional tenth anniversary gift. The Museum of Latin American Art (MoLAA) in Long Beach, California, decided to celebrate its first ten years in a much grander manner: by hiring Mexican architect Manuel Rosen to create a new building.

After reviewing the work of a number of architects, Rosen emerged as the ideal choice, museum founder and chairman Robert Gumbiner said. Rosen had already established an international reputation for creating exciting exhibition spaces with his designs for the Cultural Center in Tijuana, Mexico, and the Monument to Fray Anton de Montesinos in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. "We never tried to build an ostentatious museum. We don't have a lot of stone or glass, but what we do have is a great design," Gumbiner observes.

For the new museum, located in the city's nascent East Village Arts District, Rosen created a pair of dramatic, interconnected rectangular arches, which provide a kind of frame for the building. They also serve as a metaphorical statement of the museum's purpose. "The arches represent bridges between North and South America. In this way, the building is in harmony with our mission," says Gregorio Luke, until recently MoLAA's director.

"Beyond the arches, small square openings envelop the museum's exterior walls, creating a necklace of light as the sun follows its dally path across the sky," Rosen adds. "Floating beneath the arches, an expansive reflection pool celebrates MoLAA's proximity to the Pacific Ocean."

The building's color scheme is as dramatic as its structure. The tower rising from the reflecting pool, designed by Rosen to counterbalance the design's angularity, provides a splash of bright blue, which is echoed in a quartet of rectangles that float horizontally across the building's facade. The wall that anchors one edge of the arch spanning the reflecting pool offers a contrasting field of deep burgundy--the same red Rosen used to spell out the museum's name across the building's entrance.

A wide range of opening festivities--hosted by television personality and art collector Cristina Saralegui, who provided her own overview of the museum's permanent collection--inaugurated the building's new and expanded spaces last June. Among the additions enabled by Rosen's design were another gallery, a classroom/studio which can accommodate three times the number of students as the museum's prior educational space, and an...