This post was updated Feb 14 at 7:08 p.m.

The newly renovated Nimoy Theater in Westwood won the Best Hospitality Project award at the Los Angeles Business Council’s 54th Annual Architectural Awards this October.

The recent renovations recognized the theater’s transformation from a historic cinema into a modern state-of-the-art performance space. Due to a large donation from Susan Bay Nimoy, actress and widow of Leonard Nimoy, the theater – renamed in his honor in 2023 – underwent extensive renovations following UCLA’s 2018 acquisition of the property.

According to the UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance website, since reopening in September 2023, the renovated theater’s programming features “contemporary performing artists from Los Angeles and around the world,” with mediums including theater, installation-performance, general music and literary events.

The live performance venue was renamed in honor of Leonard Nimoy’s own contributions to the performing arts as an actor and director, portraying Mr. Spock in the Star Trek franchise.

Mary Leslie, president of the LA Business Council, outlined the standard for the 2024 winners in an official statement.

“The LABC is honoring projects whose inspired designs build on L.A.’s heritage and move the city toward a dynamic future,” she said in the LABC’s 2024 Architectural Awards press release.

John Lesak – a principal at Page & Turnbull, an architecture, planning and conservation firm that oversaw the historic preservation during the renovations – said the theater’s history dates back to its 1940 opening as the UCLAN Theater.

The UCLAN Theater, designed by Arthur Hawes, began as a performing arts venue before being repurposed during World War II to exclusively screen newsreels.

In 1950, the theater changed hands and continued operations as a single-screen film venue. In the 1980s, the Disney Company partnered with Pacific Theaters, which had acquired the theater two years earlier, to renovate the structure and rename it “The Crest Theatre.”

Disney’s in-house theater designer, Joseph Musil, in collaboration with BAR Architects and Interiors, renovated the Crest into an Art Deco-style revival theater. In 2008, the Crest was nominated as Historic-Cultural Monument No. 919 by the city of LA.

“The nomination puts the emphasis on this transformation of the theater by this master artist,” Lesak said.

Zach Prowda, associate principal and director of BAR Architects and Interiors’ LA office, led the 2018 renovations, marking the firm’s second project involving the theater. Hand-drawn designs from retired colleagues who worked on the 1980s renovations guided the transformation into the Nimoy Theater, ensuring the continuation of Musil’s original vision, Prowda said.

“The theater has gone through several lives, and I think our intent from the get-go was to have it live another life,” Prowda said. “That meant honoring what had happened before and making sure it could continue to live moving forward.”

The renovations to the theater aimed to maintain the historic integrity of the structure while ensuring a more visitor-friendly performance arts space, Prowda added. He said they incorporated modern components into the original structure, particularly a larger lobby, a green room, nongendered bathrooms and elevators to make the building fully ADA accessible.

“The history of the theater was really important to us, and then there were these new things that we were trying to accomplish,” Prowda said. “Our job was really to stitch those two things together, which I think we did successfully.”

Among the original architecture that was preserved were the murals, the pylons against the murals, the front marquee and the shell, and the roof and perimeter of the building, Prowda said. The theater itself was laser scanned to create a 3D model prior to construction and was photographically documented, Prowda added.

The murals and plaster were restored and stored for reassembly, the facade and marquee preserved in place with updated digital signage and the front doors replaced with historic etched glass, Prowda said.

Todd Lynch, principal project planner with UCLA Capital Programs, advised the incorporation of sustainable features, earning the Nimoy Theater its LEED Gold rating, indicating excellence in sustainable design and operation. The theater focused on adaptive reuse – the giving of new life to older buildings – in order to extend the Nimoy’s life cycle, he said.

Preserving the original structure saved building materials, reducing environmental impact from embodied carbon, Lynch said.

“This idea of trying to optimize and give new life to an existing building is very important – not only maintaining continuity with the community but in terms of the story of embodied carbon and extending it,” he said. “It’s a really important way to address the climate crisis.”

The Nimoy Theater has received a variety of recent awards centered around culture and community, affirming the commitment to hospitality that UCLA has made with the revitalization of this historic theater, Prowda said.

“This project really successfully stuck to its core mission of ‘How can this particular organization within the university serve the community through the performing arts coming out of a time when the performing arts were really struggling,’” Prowda said. “The university made this amazing commitment in the middle of the pandemic to say this is important, this is important for our greater community, this is important for Los Angeles.”