I couldn’t pass up making a stop at one of the larger car museums in the US while passing through Tacoma, Washington. The LeMay Museum, a 165,000 sq ft automotive-shaped structure completed in 2004 was designed by Large Architecture stands out against the blocky Tacoma skyline. Much of the above ground shell is constructed from thick glulam beams visible on the inside.

Branded as America’s Car Museum, it houses much of the original collection of Harold and Nancy Lemay. Harold passed away in 2000 and at the time of his death held the record for the largest private car collection in the world totaling more than 3,000 vehicles.

The current collection is primarily North American focused and skews 20th century till the 1970s. During my visit there was a special exhibition, The Birth of the American Supercar curated by Steve Saleen. It included a number of American made Saleen performance cars and a debut of the forthcoming S11 supercar in full-size clay model form.

I like the grand scale of the main timber clad atrium. Walking the rest of the museum is a bit like the Guggenheim in NYC. A series of long ramps connect the four floors of the building and there’s basically a linear path from top to bottom. Navigation is easy but there are consequences to this design feature. The cars parked on the ramps are on a slope meaning the walls and surrounding graphics are at an angle to the cars. It makes for weird alignments in photos.

The lighting overall is also pretty inconsistent and could use an upgrade. Some areas are better than others but the general character of the interior lighting is slightly better than a parking garage. I’d love to see more overhead soft boxes or broad overhead lighting to get more surface reflections in the cars. Point lighting for cars is always inadequate and doesn’t show off any body sculpture.

One other critique I have is cars on the lower floors are parked in tight rows and it’s impossible to get profile views or see the backs. I have to reuse the parking garage analogy here because it really is like that.

There are some really nice cars to spend some time with here. The cream 1956 Continental Mark II is stunning with the factory frenched headlights. The 1933 Hupmobile has some wonderful details and accessory leather work. The silver 1959 BMW 507 is gorgeous.

Photos and Text: Dave Pinter