The scaffolding is off the Petersen Automotive Museum on Mid-Wilshire, and even though the building isn't yet open to the public, the reactions have been passionate.
"The New Look of the Petersen Automotive Museum is Really Really Bad," trumpeted a headline in Curbed. (The story, by Marissa Gluck, went on to describe the building as "the Guy Fieri of buildings: obnoxious, loud, and, ultimately, sure to be inexplicably embraced by the public.")
— latimes.com
Los Angeles is enjoying its fair share of museum-related news these days:
51 Comments
That Guy Fieri comment is spot on..
Yes, it should be like the underwhelming, yawn-inducing box that Renzo Piano put across the street...
The comment from Curbed is unfair and premature. A true understanding of the design will emerge in a year or so, after it is open and functioning.
Some may have a problem with the see-through areas above the old structure, but than can be dealt with if it becomes important. The design as it is, is a welcome visual jolt in this area of town and represents our auto culture very effectively. More important will be the interiors and the collections.
I remember the old Ohrbach's and Buffum's that used to be in the building. This is a great solution for a problem corner.
lipstick on a pig...
Words can't really describe how much I hate this building.
looks like a piece of shit
Amazingly, astoundingly bad. I mean someone is actually shelling out a pile of dough to build this PoS.
I just see bacon.
Meanwhile, two miles north, the Mummy has awakened.
If people are doing bad work for the press... I guess Curbed will always Bite (in more ways than one).
I don't see anything wrong with it. There is plenty of precedent for that kind of architecture.
what the hell do those weird ass lines have to do with our car culture?
I love LA, we love it
KPF stated on their website that, "the steel “ribbons” evoke a sense of speed and movement ." I think they weren't too successful with that design concept. All I see are contour lines or rivers of stainless steel. I think Morphosis executed speed and movement in their lobby at their Caltrans Building in downtown LA. It reminds me of the streaks of light on the highways that crisscross SoCal.
i appreciate that it makes no pretension that facade design is anything more than adding a decorative shell. no obscure parametric theory for this nor cynical effort to greenwash. it just revels in being a shiny metal swoosh with purely decorative function.
but the red backpainting is awful dated. reminds me of parc de la villette and the 1980's. if youre going to go pure aesthete you need to get some sense of taste.
mmmm, bacon.
All I see is non-camoflage stripes.
Museums to industry (meant to be experienced solely by car) are the new funerary monuments. Absolute space mixed with Billboard. Tragic monument to death and destruction - saturated with capitalist ideology and claims to transcendence as long as you post a selfie and get something at the gift shop - the new indulgences for the faithful.
+++ situationist Tragic monument to death and destruction - saturated with capitalist ideology
doesnt walk like a duck
its not a decorated shed
its a pretty meager pile of feathers shook out over a meager shed i guess
there was a joke in school for when your project sucked: first make it big - if that doesnt work make it red. this building reminds me of that . . ..
There is plenty of precedent for that kind of architecture.
Agreed, there is a lot of precedent for really bad architecture.
At the risk of repeating myself, I will say that I love this building much more than the sleepy box Renzo Piano designed across the road. Meh.
I don't think its "bad". I think that people are responding to the fact that its an expressive aesthetic.
^ "wish I was like you, easily amused"
-Curt Cobain
Its not expressing much except that the designer likes curvy ribbons...Reminds me of the interior of a trendy teen store in a shitty mall...
https://youtu.be/qQ3cSfzaYEk
Andy Bernard: I'm not insightful enough to be a movie critic. Maybe I could be a food critic. "These muffins taste bad." Or an art critic. "That painting is bad."
"Its not expressing much except that the designer likes curvy ribbons...Reminds me of the interior of a trendy teen store in a shitty mall..."
If you've ever attended a classic car show (which often take place in the parking lots of shitty malls), or an auto industry event, you know that indulgent consumer culture is central to American car culture. On the surface, cars are often sexy and stupid but they're also extremely sophisticated machines.
Also, metal fabrication seems to be an obvious conceptually link between the facade with the automobiles inside.
With that said, I do still wish a more interesting firm than KPF had design this building.
at best that thing looks like a bad first year studio project.
sameol...Renzo should kick you in the balls for saying that...twice. LACMA is minimal, but clean as fuck, the roof, forget about it...all light, custom louvers on the whole thing. There is a rigor in LACMA totally lacking in that jerk off exercise, thing that bugs me the most about it is the metal ribbons are just applied, no function, what is the purpose...to look cool? because it fails on that front also.
I love it.
It's like KPF's testicles/ovaries finally descended/matured.
mice will do the great projects for us if they graduate from drawing toilet partitions. hehe.
chigurh, have you seen the roof from the inside of the renzo box? Seems like he did not design it for LA smog. There is a rigor in his design yes, but there is something about the scale and proportions of the spaces that is just not right. Lets not even talk of how the building talks to the existing context and how it meets the ground, because it seems it was thought of in isolation.
I know criticizing Renzo is blasphemy, but LACMA just doesnt cut it. There were more interesting proposals in the competition, including one by OMA that was quite intriguing.
Is this what they are teaching in architecture school?
Is this what they are teaching students to do?
I'd be better off saying F--- the M.Arch. I'll just take experience path.
I can do better design design of buildings than this.
Nope, it's just bad. I've been trying to be considerate of it but it's really not worth it - it's a crappy, lazy design. The lines are supposed to "evoke speed"? But when car designers put curves on a car it's in service of one specific aspect of "speed": forward motion and streamlining air flow. Yes those curves are frequently exaggerated but they spring from an intent. These curves are somehow organic-ish while also being about functional engineering?
Fail. It's a terrible building.
Anyway Eugene Kohn, project mastermind and KPF principal, is a product of the "the experience path" (no professional architecture degree - his education was in liberal arts and real estate.)
Bloopox,
Interesting. I suppose he been hanging around and drinking out of Franky's Kool-aid a little bit.
Pile a bunch of dirt and put some grass.
I think the biggest problem is the ribbons of lines just doesn't evoke the flow because the lines of sports cars evoke strong sense of horizontality for streamline air flow along the road of predominate horizontal movement along the forward motion. Therefore, to evoke that feeling, the building should be horizontal and have strong curved but horizontal lines. Much akin to Ferrari and Lambourghini (sp?). If there was more of that paralleling along the road, you could invoke the streamline, aerodynamics and strong horizontal-oriented flowy lines would give this building that feeling.
Trying to do that vertically and horizontally, doesn't quite work. Now, if you wanted to make it look like a hill, than add some dirt and grass, it'll work. (LOL!)
The inside kind of works. The firm has done better work in my opinion.
what the hell is quondam rambling about...those images...too much LSD
^ Trolling.
I read Balkin's post Is this what they are teaching in architecture school? as referring to the psychotic image above it.
I've never agreed with quodam before and usually wish he wouldn't post at all, but I'm with him on this one. What that building needs is a bunch of psychedelic/psychotic LEDs grooving away behind the shiny ribbon shit. Just keep smearing more lipstick on that fucker.
.
Okay, now I have to go look at the damned thing.
LOL!
QonDamn,
The point is to give this static object a sense of being in motion and speed. Looking at it is a optical eye sore. I have to agree, anonitect with what he wrote at 4:45 PM.
Give it something like seeing a parked Ferrari.
Oh well... its a debate that will obviously end with needing a handful of aspirin.
I'm not sure I am getting that but okay.
This is what I would be thinking and drawing from:
https://www.google.com/search?q=aerodynamic+car&espv=2&biw=1825&bih=878&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0CBwQsARqFQoTCIbQ6KHLncgCFQIIkgod-nAGYQ
and then:
https://www.google.com/search?q=aerodynamic+car&espv=2&biw=1825&bih=878&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0CBwQsARqFQoTCIbQ6KHLncgCFQIIkgod-nAGYQ#tbm=isch&q=aerodynamic+buildings
and
https://www.google.com/search?q=aerodynamic+car&espv=2&biw=1825&bih=878&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0CBwQsARqFQoTCIbQ6KHLncgCFQIIkgod-nAGYQ#tbm=isch&q=Eero+Saarinen+twa
and
and
and
and
why should a car museum even try to look like a car in any way? art museums don't particularly resemble or try to imitate art.
I think this is more the analogy that KPF was going for.
++++Noah. You got it, exact.
Noah that is hilarious; love.
quondrum will no doubt put that image in proper perspective with a dissertation about the index of friction of the textural fabric of racing stripes on the ball sack.
Fully illustrated, of course.
What a relief! Here I was thinking you were going to kill yet another thread by clogging it up with dozens of psychotic digital mashups and pages of senseless archibabble.
it just sucks. whatever brilliant insights it affords are due to the brilliance of the viewer.
Q is a brilliant viewer.
miles is interested in ballsacks.
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