On a slope with spectacular ocean views, the Art Center in La Jolla, a neighborhood of San Diego, opened in 1941 in the 1916 villa that architect Irving Gill had designed for newspaper magnate/philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps. As the venue expanded its mission and collections, the original stuccoed-concrete house, an early example of California Modernism, acquired motley additions. In 1950, local architects Mosher & Drew (M&D) annexed formal galleries and, a decade later, an auditorium, along with other modifications. In 1996, Venturi Scott Brown & Associates (VSBA) reworked the overall organization, adding amenities such as a café, museum shop, and outdoor sculpture garden; the firm also stripped away M&D’s early-1960s front elevation to reveal and restore the Scripps House’s facade. Adjoining it, VSBA’s new elevation echoed the villa’s flat planes and arched openings, traits shared by Gill’s La Jolla Woman’s Club across the street. The reconfigured entry sequence proceeded from a forecourt—featuring a riff on the original colonnaded pergolas that fronted the house and club—into a lobby, crowned by a star-shaped cupola with neon-edged forms, evocative of a starburst or palm fronds. That similarly exuberant Postmodernist spirit infused VSBA’s twin pergolas, with their extra-plump columns on undersized plinths. But after the New York firm Selldorf Architects (SA) set out, in 2014, to rethink and expand the museum yet again, its proposed design eliminated those paired structures. “People could never figure out where to enter the building,” says SA senior project architect Ryoji Karube. (Years earlier, VSBA’s remedies included retrofitting the sequence with neon labels and even encouraging the museum to install a giant topiary arrow pointing to the door.) “Those columns,” Karube adds, “also obscured much of Gill’s facade, which we wanted to celebrate.”