Happy Fiftieth Birthday Los Angeles County Museum of Art

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ct-cm-ca-lacma-50-architecture-20150412-column.html#page=1

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

In Architecture in Southern California, Messrs. Gebhard and Winter included two projects by the late Mr. Pereira, the brand new LACMA was not among them.  The reason for this was,

...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

Christopher Hawthorne writes,

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

The late Richard Lillard, inspired by feeling that the Southern California landscape was undergoing a radical transformation, nearly completed his book Eden in Jeopardy in 1965 (http://www.amazon.com).  The book is impassioned tome against Los Angeles's love of demolishing, subdividing, road making, migrating, building, changing, improving.  Two years later, William Bronson's book How to Kill a Golden State (1967, http://www.amazon.com) made a similar argument.  However, if one California was slipping off into the sunset, a new one was taking its place.  A new generation of architects-younger architects and critics-were poking at the modernist corpse, subverting and looking further afar than Mr. Pereira was willing to attempt.

 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

The undermining and moving past the modernist philosophy was taking form among fine artists working in Los Angeles.  The Fergus Gallery, propelled to prominence by Ed Kienholz, Billy Al Bengston, et al, had peaked of its influence.  The next generation of artists and architects were beginning to set up shop near the beach, far west as they could get from the Hancock Park elite and LACMA as they could get.  Architect Frank Gehry's studio for Lou Danzinger was completed in 1965 on a non-descript section of Melrose Avenue.  The building was clad in the blandest spray-on stucco Mr. Gehry could lay his hands on, "a deadpan celebration, far more carefully composed that it let on, of the postwar, car-dominated L.A. streetscape."

Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965)
Edward Ruscha
artconnected.org

If Frank Gehry's Danzinger Studio was a three-dimensional celebration of the postwar car culture, so was Ed Ruscha's photography books on the City of Angels, including the 1965 series Some Los Angeles Apartments.   (http://www.amazon.com)  The gulf between this subversive attitude and the William Pereira museum would soon manifest itself as an actual subject for Mr. Ruscha in his 1968 painting Los Angeles County Museum on Fire.  The same year LACMA mounted an exhibition, designed by Mr. Gehry, on Mr. Bengston's work.  The Gehry designed installation used his now signature plywood and corrugated-metal walls as a way of tweaking the nose of the pretentious Pereira architecture with the same efficacy as the Ruscha painting.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire (1968)
Edward Ruscha
oseculoprodigioso.blogspot.com

 In 1977, David Gebhard and Robert Winter published a second edition of their architecture guidebook.  They did make room for an entry on LACMA, albeit dismissively, writing The architecture is not much.  This remark seems more of a reaction to William Pereira's diligent, instead of imaginative, approach to design. The design of the museum campus indicated that the architect was not fully ready to break with the orthodoxy of modernism.  This almost sounds as if Christopher Hawthorne is trying to regain some of his lost enthusiasm for the Peter Zumthor design.  Try a little harder.  However the fault does not lie entirely with the architect.  Some of it falls at the feet of the LACMA board of directors who were not entirely comfortable with breaking with the modernist canon, in favor of something more imaginative.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art c.1965
en.wikipedia.org

It is this context, the hesitancy to try something novel and expressive, we can look at LACMA's much analyzed romancing of modern movement giant Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, the German architect working in Chicago.  Had the museum selected Mies Van der Rohe, it would have been a choice based on good taste rather than daring.  Principal donor, Howard Ahmanson, preferred Edward Durrell Stone, who manner of design was similar to William Pereira but more decorative.  Mr. Hawthorne writes, "If Pereira wasn't ready to break from the Miesian model in any radical way, he seemed (as Stone did, even the LACMA board must have by the time it settled on a final choice) the growing restlessness among architects and critics with orthodox modernism."

Lou Danziger Studio
Frank Gehry
West Hollywood, California
ncmodernist.org

In an essay on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, published by the Los Angeles Times in March 1965, William Pereira emphasized the logic of his design.  It, after all, was a public building and he wanted to let the readers know it would not be some fanciful vanity exercise, unlike the Zumthor scheme.  In the end, Mr. Pereira took the middle ground, holding up an aging movement and suggesting something beyond it.  Mr. Pereira's three buildings are set back from Wilshire Boulevard, atop reflecting pools and accessible via a pedestrian bridge, wrapped, as the Times wrote in 1965, by colonnades of slender concrete columns [and] faced with thousands of split-faced Cipollino marble tiles, all individually hand set.  There are some decorative and playful element, carefully calculated.

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.