Entrance to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art blog.archpaper.com |
Hello Everyone:
Another native Los Angeleno is celebrating a fiftieth birthday-the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. A big Happy Birthday to the museum in my backyard. Fifty is a good time to step back and consider the period that LACMA was born. The year 1965 was pivotal year in social-cultural history. The cultural epicenter was beginning to shift westward, away from the established center in New York. Today, with the help of Christopher Hawthorne's article "Consider the social-architectural context of LACMA's 1965 design," for the Los Angeles Times. The campus opened in April 1965 on Wilshire Boulevard, designed by prolific local architect William Pereira. Coincidentally, the museum's book-printing arm, published Architecture in Southern California by David Gebhard and Robert Winter, the first field guide to Los Angeles architecture in almost ten years.
The Ahmanson Building at LACMA laconservancy.org |
...partly an expression of editorial independence from a pair young architectural historians. It also summed up quite neatly the prevailing wisdom about the LACMA when they appeared: that in their proper, boxy, and beige late-modern dress they were dignified at best and stolid and self-serious at worst.
In a telephone interview with Mr. Hawthorne, Mr. Winter said that excluding LACMA was intentional...We thought it was so ugly.
As the museum hits the half century mark, the debate rages on about museum director Michael Govan's plan to replace the William Pereira buildings and Hugh Hardy additions with a, for lack of anything better to say, a new wing by Peter Zumthor. Whether you think the new wing is an architectural masterpiece by a Pritzker Prize winning architect or the work of a mediocre undergraduate architecture student, it is worth looking back at how the new museum was originally greeted and a few ideas about Los Angeles in the mid-sixties.
Wilshire Boulevard postcard c.1960s en.wikipedia.org |
Museum boards make conservative architectural choices all the time, of course, and the buttoned-up competence of the Pereira buildings would have been less meaningful in the historical scheme of things if not for one fact: Los Angeles in 1965 was a place which an entirely and singular way of thinking about architecture, and city-making was beginning to emerge.
Conservative architectural choice is not how blogger would describe the Zumthor scheme. A fanciful vanity exercise is a more apt description. The mid- to late-sixties was period of social unrest and growing generational divide, politically and culturally. The Watts Riots Riots would explode in a few months and freeway construction was at its peak, with its bright promise of regional connectivity. However, this new shining promise of connectivity came with a dark side, "...painful dislocation."
Johnny Rivers on stage at the Whisky c.1960s subrealities.waiting-for-the-sun.net |
A 1965 book of selected essays by architect Charles Moore, You Have to Pay for the Public Life (http://www.amazon.com), pondered a range of monumental architecture in the Golden State. Like Architecture in Southern California, Mr. Moore's book omitted the new museum, focusing on, off all places, Disneyland. With a big smile on his face, the architect referred to the Magic Kingdom as the most important single piece of construction in the West in past several decades. Irony alert.
Santa Monica, 1964 flickr.com |
Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965) Edward Ruscha artconnected.org |
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire (1968) Edward Ruscha oseculoprodigioso.blogspot.com |
Los Angeles County Museum of Art c.1965 en.wikipedia.org |
Lou Danziger Studio Frank Gehry West Hollywood, California ncmodernist.org |
It is no coincidence that both the Music Center and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art were born within months of each other. Their births signaled a direct challenge to New York City's cultural primacy. How unlike the youthful rebellion during the sixties. The restless youth challenging the staid adult. The Los Angeles of the sixties was a city of the young restless spirit. Both the Music Center and LACMA was the city's forceful bid to establish itself as a cultural epicenter, on par with New York City. Until the determined efforts of Dorothy Buffum Chandler and Howard Ahmanson, Los Angeles was looked as a cultural backwater. In building two places, dedicated to bring capital-c culture to a city on the western edge of a continent, Los Angeles was looking to challenge the East Coast cultural orthodoxy by introducing places where artists could come and practice with little constraint. In a way, this was Los Angeles in the sixties, a place where a person could come and just be. Happy Birthday Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Here's fifty fabulous years and fifty more years.
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