This year, Los Angeles should begin rebuilding the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) - one of the largest on the west coast of the United States. The new building was designed by Peter Zumthor; the local supervisory board has already approved it. This will be, perhaps, the first high-budget museum reconstruction in the history of the United States, after which the exhibition space will not increase, but, on the contrary, will decrease. At the same time, for the sake of the new complex, four modernist buildings will have to be demolished.
The total cost of the project is $ 650 million, of which $ 125 million will be allocated from the local budget, the rest will be covered by private sources. Construction work is scheduled to begin later this year and be completed in 2023.
Zumthor began work on a new building for LACMA about ten years ago, when he was invited to cooperate by the current director of the institution.
Michael Govan. The project had to be redone several times - and from time to time the exhibition space became smaller. The story that unfolds around LACMA has already been dubbed by journalists and critics as an "incredibly shrinking museum," akin to a 1950s science fiction movie. And if initially the case was started in order to add an additional 4600 m2halls, then after the construction of a new building, the exposition area will lose about 930 m2.
The approved project is the third option proposed by Zumthor. First, in 2013, it was conceived
a building that looks like a drop of thick black color. It was the first project that was most liked by architectural critics, although they, of course, dubbed it "the ink blot". Zumthor insisted it was a lily, an organic form. But due to some inconsistencies (shape and color were named among the minuses - in a hot climate, the museum would turn into a "heat island"), the Swiss architect had to rework the concept. He changed the facade color to a "boring" beige and changed the building plan. The building, which occupied an area bounded on all sides by roads, had a "tail" thrown across Wilshire Boulevard. In 2017–2019, the project underwent changes again. In the latest edition, the area of the exhibition space is approximately 10,200 m2 - instead of the promised 15 800 m2.
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zooming 1/3 Los Angeles County Museum of Art New Building LACMA (2019) Image from buildinglacma.org
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zooming 2/3 Los Angeles County Museum of Art New LACMA Building (2019) Image from buildinglacma.org
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zooming 3/3 Los Angeles County Museum of Art New Building LACMA (2019) Image from buildinglacma.org
Local residents and experts were disappointed with the appearance of the future museum; the only exception was, probably, Brad Pitt. The actor said at a meeting of the municipal council for the approval of the project that it is impossible to understand the essence of the concept from the render - you need to get to the museum to "see the skill [of creating] the play of light and shadow." The actress Diane Keaton also spoke in support of Zumthor. Nevertheless, the austere appearance of LACMA loses a lot against the background of its brighter neighbors - the Automobile Museum by Kohn Pedersen Fox (2015) or the Film Academy Museum, which is now being built according to the project of Renzo Piano. Journalists disparagingly compare Zumthor's project to a coffee table or the logo of a chain of roadside eateries.
It should be said that LACMA has at its disposal 125,000 exhibits, most of them acquired in the last 60 years. To represent the encyclopedic scope of the collection: Dutch painting of the Golden Age, sculpture of South Asia, prehistoric ceramics of Western Mexico, vessels of the Korean Joseon dynasty, German Expressionism, art of the Safavid dynasty and much more are collected here (
more details here). At the same time, the collection continues to grow, which means that a considerable part of the objects will have to be sent to the storehouse. Art critic and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Christopher Knight called the situation catastrophic "for a permanent exhibition." At the same time, there are no hints of a possible expansion in the Zumthor project: it is a self-sufficient and complete one-story structure, which does not imply further reconstruction.
The current complex consists of four "outdated" modernist buildings, which, as it is believed, can no longer cope with the function assigned to them. Three of them were built in the 1960s by the architect William Pereira. In the 1980s, a corps designed by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates (HHPA) appeared. Protectors of the architectural heritage are confident that, despite all the technical shortcomings of the existing complex, its significance for the history of the “City of Angels” cannot be ignored. “Worst of all,” writes Architect's Newspaper editor Antonio Pacheco, “the costly [architectural] solution will destroy a vital cultural resource: the museum itself as Los Angeles residents know it.” Pacheco calls the active promotion of the concept "an attempt to apply the colonial mentality to Los Angeles" by "influential people like Zumthor and Govan." The journalist accuses the “newcomers” (this applies not only to the aforementioned characters) that they do not appreciate the current image of the city and, “blinded by their own genius,” see it only as a tabula rasa for the embodiment of their ideas. Recall that 75-year-old Peter Zumthor is a Pritzker Prize winner, and Govan, who headed the Los Angeles Cultural Institution in 2006, is a protégé of Thomas Krens and has worked in the Guggenheim museums in New York and Bilbao.
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zooming 1/3 Los Angeles County Museum of Art New Building LACMA (2019) Image from buildinglacma.org
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zooming 2/3 Los Angeles County Museum of Art New LACMA Building (2019) Image from buildinglacma.org
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zooming 3/3 Los Angeles County Museum of Art New Building LACMA (2019) Image from buildinglacma.org
The reasons why the building shrank so badly are not fully understood. One of the assumptions is insufficient funding and the possibility of reducing the construction period from 68 months to 51 months. Also called "shift in museum philosophy" - due to which, in particular, the museum is strictly one-story. It is believed that this was one of Govan's requirements. “I am a big supporter of horizontal museums,” he once said at a joint performance with Zumthor. "All great museums in my opinion are horizontal." The point is that single-tier institutions are more “accessible”, they eliminate hierarchy. But this is hardly a good option for Los Angeles, whose density is growing every year.
