In 2016, if all goes according to plan, Los Angeles will have a new architectural showpiece and yet another place of pilgrimage for movie buffs—the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Created by the organization thanked in Oscar acceptance speeches, and designed by Genoa-based architect Renzo Piano and Los Angeles–based architect Zoltan Pali, the museum is envisioned as a place to celebrate both the history and future of film, with galleries, screening rooms, and an interactive education center.

According to Heather Cochran, the Academy’s managing director for the project, the programming will include “immersive exhibits, state-of-the-art audiovisual presentations, hands-on components, and of course the movies themselves, speaking for themselves.” She adds, “We want to showcase moviemaking and bring people behind the screen. Because we’re the Academy, we also want to have a connection with the Oscars and red carpet.”

The institution will take over an existing building at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, at the start of Miracle Mile’s Museum Row, on the western edge of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art campus. (LACMA, which owns the building and previously commissioned Piano to design other parts of its campus, has offered the Academy a long-term lease.) Completed in 1938, the building was originally designed by architects Albert C. Martin and S. A. Marx in the Streamline Moderne style as a May Company department store. Today, the five-story building’s façade is a designated historical monument. However, a 1946 extension on its north side will be partially replaced by Piano and Pali’s design.

“In order to really express the fact that the Academy is coming into the building, and to show its higher aspirations, we had to do something a little more major” than merely renovating the interior, explains Pali. The architects’ recently unveiled plan is to remove part of the 1946 addition and insert a 140-foot-diameter glass dome in its place, which contains a theater on slender legs that almost appears to float. “This glass dome is our architectural manifestation of another world, because cinema is about taking you to another world,” says Pali. “The roof of the theater also becomes a covered deck. You’ll be in this amazing space looking at the vista of Los Angeles, the hills to the north, and the Hollywood sign.”

Since last December, a capital campaign chaired by Disney CEO Bob Iger and co-chaired by actors Annette Bening and Tom Hanks has raised $100 million of a targeted $250 million to fund the nearly 300,000-square-foot museum. Cochran estimates that the public approvals process for the design will take about 18 to 24 months, before construction begins.

Even though Piano and Pali’s airy addition is slated to be realized more than 75 years after the original robust building was constructed, the architects believe it’s a perfectly natural fit. “Streamline Moderne architecture involves stripping down the ornament of Art Deco—it starts expressing strength and transportation, and has the sensibility of large ocean liners,” says Pali. “What we’re doing with the theater and large glass dome is about the same thing—it’s about the sense of flotation and going somewhere.”