Since opening the doors of its original William Pereira buildings in 1965, the Los Angele County Museum of Art has grown along with its home. The version of the city beloved by Reyner Banham and Pereira was alive then on the historic Miracle Mile, proselytizing megasized car-infrastructure and New Suburban models of living. From the 1980s through the 2000s, the museum expanded and reorganized, adding Bruce Goff’s Japanese Pavilion and Renzo Piano’s additions. Now, the entire conglomerate is slated for a redesign, into a singular swath by famed museum architect Peter Zumthor, with new attention paid to an incoming Metro station. And according to the Los Angeles Times’ architecture critic, Christopher Hawthorne, this is distinctly on track with where the megaregion as a whole is going – part of his so-called “Third Los Angeles”.

This third stage of Los Angeles is “an altogether more integrated, metropolitan-oriented” place, and is the namesake for Hawthorne’s ongoing lecture series exploring this progression of Los Angeles’ urbanism. It’s most recent instance was an exploration of Zumthor’s much-debated LACMA redesign, held Last Wednesday evening at Occidental College, where Hawthorne also teaches. Speakers included Michael Goven, LACMA’s director since 2006, and a host of authorities on art and architectural in Los Angeles, as well as a few voices from afar (more on that later).

After an introduction by Hawthorne, including a quick overview of the predictably polarized reactions to Zumthor’s inkblot proposal, Michael Govan took up the major defense of the design. As a major museum, LACMA expected the redesign to provoke a proportional amount of bitching and moaning – but Govan also stressed that the process will (righteously) be a long and slowly developing one. And that the aspects that incur the most criticism, namely, the sheer blackness of the inkblot’s design, will be “the last decision made … There is a kind of playfulness at this point.” A solid reminder for evaluating any high-profile design in the early stages.

And while this would be Zumthor’s first project in the U.S., let alone Los Angeles, the design neatly conjoins symbols of LA’s past, present and (hopeful) future, which is important. LACMA gives off the vibe of a more “locally” motivated museum than one might assume of comparable institutions, and that’s because most of its visitors are locals – 75%, according to Govan, unlike other major museums that are visited by 60-90% tourists. And Zumthor’s oozing, Wilshire-jumping ode to horizontality pushes the poetic buttons of highway infrastructure, while also mimicking the nearby La Brea tarpits and anticipating the incoming subway station. It conglomerates sprawl by bringing together many disparate buildings. The horizontality is also a logical move for viewing art; “every floor you go up, you lose visitors,” said Govan.

After Govan’s rousing defense, the panelists threw their thoughts onto the table, on both the design and LACMA’s role in Los Angeles’ urban history. Carolina Miranda, a culture writer and colleague of Hawthorne’s at the Times, commented that the Pereira buildings were actually hostile to the art. This may also be why no one has claimed these buildings as victims of demolition – they are approximately fifty years old, still young by architectural terms, and functionally (no matter how thorny that issue has proven in regards to arts programming) sufficient. Goff's Japanese Pavilion will remain untouched. Architect Mark Lee compared Pereira to Bobby Darin, whose undeniable charisma was peppered with highs (“Mack the Knife”, “Beyond the Sea”) and lows (“Splish Splash”). To Lee, LACMA is Pereira’s “Splish Splash”.

Miranda also proposed that Zumthor’s design actually prioritizes art viewing in a significantly different way. Rather than segregating pieces into distinct regional and temporal periods, sequenced along a linear time progression, the art would be displayed in a more fluid sequence. Traditional ticketing boundaries would be dissolved to allow for more freedom in how visitors stream into and out of the building – an atmospheric program, not a buffet line. Miranda also pointed out that this aligns mores with Latin American and Asian art-viewing practices, than with traditional European models. And while she didn’t explicitly cite Hawthorne, this mirrors other aspects of Hawthorne’s 3rd Los Angeles, namely its Latino demographic majority and strong Asian enclaves and ethnoburbs.

Those “voices from afar” included Peter Zumthor and New York-based writer/critic Alexandra Lange. Hawthorne read from an email exchange he had with Zumthor considering topics raised in his LA Times piece on the recent redesign – another resounding reminder that the final version is not floating around complete in Zumthor’s head. He and Govan are in the same boat: this is a long and gradually developing project. Things will change. In Zumthor’s words, as read by Hawthorne, “I have to find a way to accept the real size and scale of the building. At the end that means the visitor should be put in a position to easily and joyfully experience the whole of the building.”