New Autry Museum planned

Autry museum getting $100 million makeoverPlans call for a renovated museum stripped of its post-modern, Mission-style decor with one-third more space, or 79,000 square feet.

In its place will rise a National Autry Center clad in gray, red Corten steel and sheets of channel glass--including its five-story tower--surrounded by native plants and trees.

After emerging from a "canyon walk" of native oaks and sycamores, visitors would enter the Autry from the south into a "convergence canyon" of soaring bent wood in what is now an open courtyard.

The new Autry will include a northeast gallery for its Southwest Museum, a southwest gallery for its American West Museum and vast "open storage" windows into its behind-the-scenes collections.Comment:  For more on Native museums, see The Feel-Good National Museum:  Reviews of the National Museum of the American Indian.