"We're working with the other owners of the property and with Metro," said LACMA Director Michael Govan. "There's good reason to build a major development there. You've got subway access and density on Wilshire. My dream is some beautiful piece of architecture with an architecture and design museum at the base, which would add to Museum Row."
If built, the tower would offer a dramatic vertical complement to the relentlessly horizontal LACMA gallery building by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor
— latimes.com
How's this for a yin-yang in the new Los Angeles: if this goes through, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) would be responsible for two majorly different impositions on Wilshire Blvd., the city's foremost thoroughfare and itself an icon. One: a street-straddling horizontal art institution, aligning contemporary culture and Zumthor's sleek Swiss aesthetics with the form and culture of driving. Two: a relentless residential skyscraper, designed by another LA-icon, Gehry, positioned for density and to maximize access to public transportation.
Wilshire becomes a looking glass, where the old and new romances of LA can look back and forth at each another.
No final word on any of this yet, but according to the Los Angeles Times piece, Govan is considering the possibility of including Gehry's archive at the base of the new tower as well, as part of a potential architecture and design wing for LACMA. The site in question currently houses, ironically enough, the Architecture + Design Museum, which is facing demolition (along with a couple nearby structures) to accommodate subway construction.
Related: Christopher Hawthorne respectfully dissents from Zumthor's widely-praised designs for LACMA update.
3 Comments
Egad.
Is Frank now the automatic go-to guy for art museums? Or is it just that the people running them are absolutely clueless?
Oh, wait - I get it. It's a fundraising thing. Having a starchitect makes it easier to dupe the clueless rich.
Couldn't they just get a real architect and have some hookers blow potential donors?
You assume that all the potential donors have something for a hooker to blow...
Not trying to be sexist, just terse.
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