Culver City Los Angeles: Art Museums and Creative Industry Hub

Culver City occupies a peculiar and privileged position in the Los Angeles urban fabric — a small independent municipality completely surrounded by the City of LA that has parlayed its combination of historic studio infrastructure, walkable streets and creative industry tenants into one of the most consistently interesting cultural destinations in Southern California. The city's motto "Heart of Screenland" dates to the silent film era, when the Goldwyn Pictures studio here became the foundation of what is now Sony Pictures Entertainment, and the studio backlot's famous outdoor sets have appeared in hundreds of films and television productions over a century of continuous operation.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology on Venice Boulevard is one of the most celebrated and deliberately perplexing museum experiences in America, a pseudo-museum that presents fabricated exhibits with the earnest authority of an institution of learning, leaving visitors genuinely uncertain about the boundary between fact and invention. It has been described as the finest work of conceptual art in Los Angeles, and the experience of navigating its darkened galleries and encountering its impossible exhibits is unlike anything else in the city. The Hammer Museum in adjacent Westwood and the Wende Museum of the Cold War in Culver City proper represent the more conventional end of the local museum ecosystem, but both are serious institutions with significant collections.

The Helms Bakery Design District, occupying the converted bakery buildings that once supplied bread to the 1932 Olympic Games athletes, has evolved into one of the best destinations for design furniture, lighting and home goods in Southern California. The complex of mid-century buildings houses dozens of showrooms where architects and designers source the pieces for their most ambitious projects, alongside restaurants and coffee bars that sustain the working hours of the creative industry that has colonised this part of Culver City. Apple's regional headquarters, Amazon Studios, HBO and dozens of production companies have planted their flags here, making Culver City the most media-dense square mile in the world outside of Manhattan.