The Petersen Automotive Museum

Contents

1. A publisher’s museum
2. Opening on Museum Row in 1994
3. A department store first
4. New leadership and a new plan
5. The ribbon facade
6. Inside the new museum
7. The Vault and the collection
8. Where the evidence is strongest

Mike Kobeissi collects rare and exotic cars, and the Los Angeles museum devoted to machines of that kind carries the name of a magazine publisher, Robert E. Petersen. Petersen made his fortune producing Hot Rod, Car Craft and Motor Trend, among other titles, and STRUCTURE magazine’s account of the building notes that the museum he founded opened in 1994.⁷ The New York Times described him as a pioneer of special interest magazine publishing who founded the museum to explore and preserve Southern California car culture.² His name sits on a building remade more than once, and its story is partly the story of how a publisher’s idea became a landmark on Wilshire Boulevard.

A publisher’s museum

The museum grew from the same world as the magazines. Hot Rod’s report on the opening in its September 1994 issue shows how closely the two were linked: the museum chronicled how the evolving automobile shaped the evolution of Los Angeles itself, and its first displays ran from an early board track racer to a dry lakes belly tanker and other machines any hot rodder would recognize.¹ Robert Petersen and his wife, Margie, cut the ribbon, and the magazine called the day the realization of a longtime dream.¹

Opening on Museum Row in 1994

The museum opened in early June 1994 at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue in the Mid Wilshire area, near the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the La Brea Tar Pits.¹ Governor Pete Wilson joined the Petersens at the ceremony along with figures from racing such as Carroll Shelby, Andy Granatelli and Parnelli Jones, and guests at the gala got an early look at what Hot Rod called a $40 million museum, which opened to the public three days later.¹ Its cars sat in settings from lifelike dioramas to themed displays, and many exhibits were planned to change about every six months.¹

A department store first

The building was older than the museum. The New York Times reported in 2013 that the monolithic, largely windowless structure began in 1962 as a department store, and quoted the board chairman, Peter Mullin, imagining Petersen’s relief at finally turning a department store into a real museum.³ STRUCTURE identifies it as a three story reinforced concrete building designed by the Los Angeles modernist Welton Becket as a United States branch of the Japanese store Seibu, with a precast concrete facade that was removed in the renovation over a minor protest by local architecture enthusiasts.⁷ The Los Angeles Times architecture review of the remade building recalled that the 1994 conversion had already borrowed from car design, with a row of columns along Wilshire that suggested tail fins.⁵

Figure

One building, two lives

	1962	2015
Use	A United States branch of the Japanese department store Seibu	The Petersen Automotive Museum, open since 1994
Designer	The Los Angeles modernist Welton Becket	Kohn Pedersen Fox of New York
Skin	A precast concrete facade	Curved stainless steel ribbons over red aluminum
Frame	A three story reinforced concrete structure	The same structure, carrying a hidden steel exoskeleton

New leadership and a new plan

The turn toward a second life began in 2013. The Times reported that Mullin, a businessman, philanthropist and collector involved with the Petersen since its founding, became chairman with the collectors Bruce Meyer and David Sydorick as vice chairmen, and hoped to use the 20th anniversary in 2014 to lift the Petersen into global recognition.² The museum expanded tours of its Vault, the underground parking level where cars not on display were stored, after a trial proved popular.² Later that year it announced a full exterior redesign, not long after beginning to sell nearly a third of the 400 cars in its collection.³

The ribbon facade

The firm Kohn Pedersen Fox designed the new skin. Its cofounder A. Eugene Kohn said the design was meant to express constant motion, speed and the movement of air, and contrasted the building with its neighbors on Museum Row: they were gentlemen in black tie, and this was a dancer.³ Dezeen’s report on the reopening counts 308 metal ribbons, each uniquely designed, with stainless steel on their front and bottom surfaces and textured aluminum painted hot rod red on the back and top; custom stainless steel screws were made to imitate early car fasteners.⁶

The engineering was its own feat. STRUCTURE explains that the ribbons average 30 feet long and reach up to 46, that each is carried on a central aluminum pipe, and that the steel supports at ground and roof level were shaped to mimic the branching exhaust pipes of an engine manifold.⁷ A hidden steel exoskeleton inside the new rainscreen carries the extra loads to the foundation, so the original concrete frame did not have to bear them alone.⁷

Figure

The facade by the numbers

metal ribbons, each uniquely designed

308

custom stainless steel screws made to look like early car fasteners

140,000

individually controlled LED fixtures lighting the exterior

866

Inside the new museum

The museum reopened in December 2015. The Los Angeles Times reported that the work took 14 months and $90 million, added a floor and as much as 50 percent more gallery space, and filled the galleries with 100 automobiles, 23 motorcycles, four scooters and a bobsled, along with dozens of projectors, touchscreens and driving simulators aimed at younger visitors.⁴ STRUCTURE, counting the interior and exterior together, gives a total cost of $125 million.⁷ Dezeen describes 95,000 square feet of exhibition space over three floors and 25 galleries, joined by a three story spiral staircase.⁶ The opening galleries included a Hollywood exhibit with a 1989 Batmobile, a hall of silver skinned American and European cars, and a motorcycle gallery with one significant machine from each decade of the motorcycle’s history; a car elevator rated for 14,200 pounds moves exhibits between street level and the top floor.⁴

The point of it all, Mullin told the Times, was return visits: when he became chairman, staff told him that 70 percent of visitors were making their first trip, which he called the worst statistic he had ever heard.⁴ More than 90 percent of the $94 million raised came from private donors, and none from government.⁴

Figure

A visit from the top down

1. 01
   Top floorThe history of the automobile, including the exhibition Southern California: A Region in Motion.
2. 02
   Middle floorThe Industry Floor: design, technology, production, motorsports and alternative power.
3. 03
   Ground floorArtistry: coach built cars of the Art Deco era and a series of art cars.

The Vault and the collection

The galleries show only part of what the museum holds. At the reopening the underground Vault was set to display another 125 to 150 vehicles drawn from a permanent collection of more than 300.⁴ It has since grown through a gift the museum called one of the most significant moments in its history. Road & Track reported in 2026 that after Peter Mullin died in 2023 and his own museum in Oxnard closed in 2024, a vast portion of his pre war French collection moved to the Vault, and that the Petersen opened a Mullin Family Gallery, with a major exhibition of some 30 of the cars planned for 2028.⁸ Rotating shows keep the main floors changing. In late 2025 Car and Driver previewed Legends of the Dirt, the museum’s first large exhibition of off road racing machines, from Baja desert trucks to rally cars and a hillclimb special.⁹ Visitors who know the informal side of the hobby from Cars and Coffee meet here its curated counterpart.

Where the evidence is strongest

Whether the facade is good architecture remains in dispute. The Los Angeles Times review called it raucous and happily tasteless, an extroverted design that left no room for thoughtful debate about how it should relate to its future neighbors, though he praised the outdoor rooms the ribbons frame on the roof and along the sidewalk.⁵ The former chairman Bruce Meyer answered the critics simply: before, nobody knew the museum was there, and now nobody could drive past without knowing.⁴ On that narrower question the evidence is strongest. STRUCTURE concedes that critical reviews were mixed but reports that pedestrians and drivers stop to look, that attendance rose after the reopening, and that the project won a 2017 American Architecture Award.⁷ The board had set out to raise the museum from a niche collection to a widely recognized landmark, and by that measure it succeeded.⁷ Whether more visitors now come back a second time, the goal Mullin cared about most, the published sources do not yet show. The judged lawn shows that sit beside such museums in the collector calendar are the subject of the next entry, the concours d’elegance.