A $30-million renovation of the Taper

OF THE three buildings that make up architect Welton Becket's original Music Center on Bunker Hill -- the Ahmanson Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion -- it is the smallest of the group, the Taper, that can make the most credible claim to true landmark status. The decorated drum of a design, its exterior wrapped in a lacy precast relief by Jacques Overhoff, is among the most finely detailed and conceptually coherent buildings of Becket's long and varied career, during which his firm seeded Los Angeles with a number of its most recognizable pieces of architecture: the Capitol Records tower, the Beverly Hilton, the Theme Building at LAX (with William Pereira, Charles Luckman and Paul Williams) and the Equitable tower on Wilshire Boulevard, among countless others.

A $30-million renovation of the Taper, led by the L.A. firm Rios Clementi Hale Studios was recently unveiled, and confirms as well as complicates that sturdy reputation. In replacing the 41-year-old theater's outdated mechanical systems and in helping reframe the most memorable aspects of the original design, including the curving, glinting abalone wall by Tony Duquette in the lobby, the architects have managed to make the building's architectural value seem unimpeachable -- something that can't be said with the same confidence about the Chandler, which awaits a renovation that won't begin until at least 2012, or the Ahmanson, which was updated in 1995. Charles Moore may have playfully described Becket's design for the Music Center as "Late Imperial Depression-Style cake," but the Taper, for its part, looks as fresh and relevant as it has in years.