LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), the largest museum of the US West Coast, is located in a complex of buildings of different times on Wilshire Boulevard, next to monuments of paleontology and geology - Hancock Park with its Pleistocene fossils and La Brea bituminous lakes.
These lakes determined the color of the new building, and its amoeba-shaped plan, which the architect himself compared with a water lily flower, is due to the features of the relief and the need to preserve the currently existing Pavilion of Japanese Art (architect Bruce Goff, 1988). According to Zumthor and Museum Director Michael Govan, the new building should change the experience of visiting a museum. The building will stretch for more than 200 meters along Wilshire Boulevard, and its main floor will be lifted more than 10 meters into the air by 6 "modules" with vertical communications. Behind the glass facades of these "pillars" will be the open storage space, so the works stored there will be available for inspection 24 hours a day (Govan wants to exhibit as much of the LACMA collection as possible).
The presence of 6 entrances already undermines the classic museum scheme with one main axis, but on the main floor this line is developed by a "veranda" enveloping the building along the perimeter, walking along which visitors can choose any of the many paths inside - through the glass façade. The exhibition halls, despite the organic shape of the building, are rectangular in plan and of different sizes.
It is planned to arrange a huge "solar farm" on the roof of the building so that the museum not only fully supplies itself with electricity, but also gives the surplus to the city. The use of natural ventilation is also assumed.
Peter Zumthor has been working on the project for more than five years, and only now - at the special exhibition “The Presence of the Past” in LACMA - his work has been presented to the public, and so far it is only a draft design. Nevertheless, the main exhibit was a model of a new building made of black concrete weighing 6 tons and more than 10 meters long, set to mimic the perception of a real building by a pedestrian.
The duration of the work is explained not only by the well-known "leisurely" Zumthor, but also by the complexity of the task. Only after three years of deliberation, it became clear that in order to renovate the museum, it was necessary to demolish the existing structures - three buildings by William L. Pereira and Associates (1965) and the building of Hardy Holzmann Pfeiffer Associates (1986). In 2002, Rem Koolhaas, who won the competition for a new LACMA project, proposed the same thing, but the museum's board of trustees rejected his proposal. Whether the council will agree to Zumthor's plan, with an approximate budget of $ 650 million, remains to be seen.
Renzo Piano was also involved in the renovation of LACMA - his plan was approved in 2004, and within its framework, the Broad Museum of Contemporary Art and the Resnik exhibition pavilion were built next to the existing complex, but on this it was decided to complete the implementation of the Piano version, replacing the Italian architect Zumthor.
