http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-0062-lacma-design-20130602,06630482.story
Hello Everyone:
First of all, we broke 600, awesome thanks for all your support. Is 1000 pageviews possible? Let's do it. Now on to today's topic, the projected future of a venerable Los Angeles museum.
Yes art museums do exist in Los Angeles and some are quite good. Everyone knows the Getty Museum and Villa. In Downtown Los Angeles there is the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and The Geffen Contemporary. Moving west along Wilshire Boulevard is the Los Angeles Museum of Art (LACMA). LACMA began its life in the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art established in 1910 in Exposition Park, near the University of Southern California. In 1961, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was established as a separate art-centric entity. In 1965, the new institution opened its door at its current location on Wilshire Boulevard, with the permanent collection in the Ahmanson Building, special exhibitions in the Hammer Building, and the 600-seat Bing Theater for public programs. Over several decades, the museum has grown considerably. In 1968, The Anderson Building (renamed the Art of the Americas Building in 2007) was opened to house works of modern and contemporary art. In 1988, The Pavilion for Japanese Art by Bruce Goff opened on the east end of the campus. In 1994, the former May Company department store building was acquired by the museum and named LACMA West. More recently, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, intended to house postwar art, on the western end of the campus opened in 2008 and in the Autumn of 2010, the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion opened and in 2011 Chris Burden's Urban Light installation was opened. (http://www.lacma.org/overview) Now the director of the museum Michael Govan and Swiss architect Peter Zumthor are poised to totally remake the venerable site with a bolder more contemporary vision.
The new building, that will be unveiled in an exhibition opening June 9 titled "The Presence of the Past: Peter Zumthor Reconsiders LACMA, comes at an important time for the city. Los Angeles has historically been home to some of the innovative architecture. However, in the last several years, little in the way of architectural poetry has been produced and the city is in danger of losing its reputation for innovation. As I've said in a previous post, when it comes to novel civic architecture, Los Angeles has fallen back on academic style tropes. The lone exception being the Walt Disney Concert Hall by Frank Gehry and a few other projects but unique architectural design has largely been reserved for residential work. The bold contemporary design proposed by Mr. Zumthor would give the city a much needed shot in the public building arm. However, this new vision for the respected museum is not going up just yet.
There is still quite a bit of work that needs to done before the cornerstone can be laid. Both Messrs Govan and Zumthor have spent nearly five years on the project, only to come up with a conceptual design. Five years and all you have to show is a conceptual design? The Mr. Govan will have to win support, presumably from the Los Angeles County, to raze the Bing Center, Ahmanson, Arts of the America and Hammer Buildings in order to make room for Mr. Zumthor's buildings. Mr. Govan will also have to get approval from The Natural History Museum, which owns the La Brea Tar Pits, in order to let LACMA cantilever the new galleries over the tar pits. Then, of course, there is the money thing. Mr. Govan will have to raise $650 million, at $450 million to build the new structure, with the remainder as a contingency fund and other uses. The museum director has argued that the aging buildings will soon need as much as $300 million in upgrades and restoration if the museum wants to retain them. Hmm, it sounds like it would be more cost effective to spend the $300 million in upgrades and restoration then a splashy new campus.
The differences in costs aside, the new structure would be more efficient than the existing one, Mr. Govan estimates that it would $5 million less per year to operate. Regardless, the proposed building is horizontal, fluid, and dense referencing, perhaps, the tar pits. This contrasts from most of the Swiss architect's previous work which is characterized as vertical and compact, made from rich and tactile material, frugal in space and motion. As the tar that covered the site did millions of years ago, the horizontally oriented proposed design spreads freely across the property. From above, the design, nicknamed by the architect "the Black Flower," has a liquid, flowing character, another reference to the tar (maybe), that resembles the spirit of Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer or a collage by modern artist Jean Arp, then anything else Mr. Zumthor has previously done.
From above, the proposed design presents a powerful graphic that spreads beyond the confines of the site into the city itself. The strongest element of the design is the way it reflects contemporary Los Angeles. Like the city, it is open and tolerant, it has no single point of entry or front staircase. It is also mysterious without being aloof, inviting multiple readings as visitors move through the space. The drawings for the new museum present an energetic rethink of the architecture of the museum. In short, what Mr. Govan is hoping to do is use the proposal as way to reject the familiar civic architectural tropes in favor of something more bold. The new building would come right up to the Wilshire Boulevard sidewalk, enabling pedestrians to walk underneath it from the street or across the museum. The new galleries would include 170,000 to 200,000 square feet of exhibition space, 45,000 square feet more than are currently housed in the buildings slated for demolition, according to estimates. The amoebic-shaped building rejects the modernist shapes of the original William Pereira designs in favor of tentacles that reach out into the northwest and northeast corners of the campus, edging back to accommodate the Pavilion for Japanese Art.
From certain angles, the buildings legs, "pods" or "cores" referred to by the architect, resemble a large animal rising out of the tar, again another reference to the site's history. From other angles, the new structure will appear transparent, open at ground level, wrapped in glass. The legs will contain ground-level storage for art not currently on exhibit, visible to the public, presenting a genuinely unique solution to a major challenge. Peter Zumthor's architecture is generally modest in scale and carefully coordinated to the human body. In most of his work, there is a single, often heavy front door, and a carefully choreographed entry sequence. You're forced to pay attention to the weight and materials and how their made. How to translate this into an architecture that is a greater scale was a dilemma for Mr. Zumthor.
The seven staircases suggest a way to resolve the issue. Mr. Zumthor wants each staircase to be different in scale and material. Good luck getting that past Building and Safety. Each will be small enough to allow the architect to control the way visitors initially come in contact with the architecture. Both Messrs. Govan and Zumthor envision the design, each of the staircases taking the visitors to a gallery holding a key piece of the LACMA collection. The galleries would be rectilinear and boxy, playing against the plastic nature of the building's container. A continuous walkway would run along the exterior, affording views of the Hollywood Hills and Wilshire Boulevard via floor-to-ceiling glass, perhaps not to be outdone by the Getty and its spectacular views. The space along the walkway, which Mr. Zumthor calls a "circular gallery" would contain rotating exhibits. The walkway would be pulled back from the building to make room for terraces at certain points, including on the west side of the building, where a restaurant could be placed overlooking Chris Burdon's installation and the rest of the campus.
Though it is still a work in progress, still full of speculative gestures, what still remains is how the it would feel to walk underneath the museum's raised floor. The questions that need to be answered are how the space would be clad or look from the ground. The main challenge will to keep the space from appearing cave-like. Little in the way of landscaping has been addressed. Lighting, a crucial element in museums, is still under discussion. Mr. Zumthor has become obsessed with the diffused light of the city. Thus it remains to be seen if this obsession will translate into an innovative approach to the lighting strategy.
The plan looks ambitious and bold for Los Angeles civic architecture. Maybe this is what civic architecture needs for the twenty-first century.
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