Despite the quarantine, in Los Angeles, the buildings of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) are being demolished: in their place will be a new building by Peter Zumthor. Four buildings are being dismantled: the modernist edifices of the important city architect William Pereira (1965), including the Bing Theater, and the gallery of art of the Americas by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates (1986). Even those who were not noticed in love for these structures are outraged by the decision of the museum's management - to start work when most of the townspeople are locked at home and cannot interfere with them, or simply to witness the “death” of an important ensemble. And also - at a time of major changes in the economic climate. It is possible that patrons of the arts will change their minds to help the museum, new construction will be delayed or canceled altogether, and the metropolis will remain without an important cultural institution for many years.
Zumthor's plan itself raises many questions. As a result of its implementation, the area of the museum will decrease, so many of the exhibits currently available for viewing will go to the storehouse, and the library and staff offices will generally move to another location. In an inexplicable way, the reconstruction will create the problems that plans of this kind usually solve - the lack of space, the territorial disunity of the institution. Zumthor's project does not look amazing at all, while the building is thrown across Wilshire Boulevard completely without meaning and function, capturing the territory on the other side of it.
We wrote about this in more detail a year ago. Los Angeles County is allocating $ 125 million to the museum for this project, which would be very useful in the social sphere in the context of a pandemic; in total, according to the latest data, the project budget will be 750 million.
In such a situation, a serious movement of resistance arose to the new project of Zumthor and its customer - LACMA Director Michael Govan. One of the most vocal critics, Joseph Giovannoni, an architect and publicist (read last year's article on the topic here), founded The Citizens' Brigade to Save LACMA movement. The main move of this group is the organization of an international competition for alternative projects for the restructuring of the museum. Its task is logical: the project should occupy a smaller area than Zumthor's, but contain more area, cost less (that is, do without large quantities of architectural concrete), prioritize the museum function, and not a "dictatorial architectural gesture", take into account the environment, including LACMA corps by Bruce Goff and Renzo Piano, as well as natural monuments.
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zooming 1/4 Project Coop Himmelb (l) au. New Building from Scratch Category Image courtesy of The Citizens' Brigade to Save LACMA
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zooming 2/4 Project Coop Himmelb (l) au. New Building from Scratch Category Image courtesy of The Citizens' Brigade to Save LACMA
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zooming 3/4 Project Coop Himmelb (l) au. New Building from Scratch Category Image courtesy of The Citizens' Brigade to Save LACMA
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zooming 4/4 Project Coop Himmelb (l) au. New Building from Scratch Category Image courtesy of The Citizens' Brigade to Save LACMA
The authoritative jury was headed by Aaron Betsky, and despite the close deadline, such large bureaus as Coop Himmelb (l) au, Barkow Leibinger, Reiser + Umemoto and others responded to the call. Until May 15, you can vote for your favorite project. The best ideas are divided into plans with the preservation of all buildings and with the planned demolition of four buildings. The honorable mention works can be viewed here.
The old LACMA buildings can no longer be saved, which the activists could not initially know about, but the project can still be replaced - taking into account, among other things, the social and economic situation that has radically changed due to Covid-19.
Los Angeles history, with all its striking features, reminds of the difficulties with other Zumthor projects, for example, the Topography of Terror memorial in Berlin, where the plan of the Swiss architect was declared unrealizable already at the height of construction, and the erected concrete staircase and elevator nodes were not without labor demolished (as you know,a functional and inexpensive project was later implemented on that site).
