W Magazine reports on the opening of the Marciano Art Foundation

“The museum, 110,000 square feet, four floors, and more than 1,000 works in the collection, does not have small ambitions.

The building itself has a long, storied history: built in 1961 by Millard Sheets, the massive travertine Scottish Rite Masonic Temple housed a 2,000-seat auditorium, since the upper degrees of Masonry were given in the form of elaborate plays with sumptuous costumes, wigs, and set design. In the 1990s, it housed the National Guard during the L.A. riots, then had to be abandoned in 1994, too expensive for the Masons to keep. The Marciano brothers purchased it for $8 million in the early 2010s and had it retrofitted by the art world architect Kulapat Yantrasast, keeping much of the original architecture, including eight massive guard statues on the façade.”

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