What was once a project designed to add nearly 50,000 square feet of critically needed gallery space committed to showcasing the museum’s impressive and still-growing permanent collection of paintings, sculptures and other global works of art has been turned on its head. Now, rather than enlarge the capacity, the scheme is to reduce the existing gallery square footage by more than 10,000 square feet. — Los Angeles Times
The criticism of Peter Zumthor's newest proposal for the LACMA campus offered by LA Times writer Christopher Knight is simple: it offers 10,000 less square footage than what it will replace! "I couldn’t name another art museum anywhere that has ever raised hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on reducing its collection space," Knight writes.
Zumthor's plans for LACMA have been coming out for years, and the sharp criticism they receive each time appears to be addressed in each subsequent iteration. It seems unlikely that the current design would get approved with significantly less square footage than what it plans to replace, just as it is unlikely we will see the end of the design process any time soon. As Knight reminds us, Peter Zumthor "is known as a slow, deliberate designer whose aim is to craft evocative, atmospheric spaces."
Every redesign has come with an additional fee that already began at a staggering number. "The $600-million price tag presented to county officials in 2014 for their initial project greenlight soon bumped up to $650 million," Knight reports. "With a reduced building plan now, LACMA is offering less art for more money. Is an Incredible Shrinking Museum really worthy of taxpayer support?"
7 Comments
Uninspired bland shit
Give the project to Gehry.
give it to piano.
It's becoming more and more obvious that the design hopelessly ignores the functional needs of the museum. To make this design work, all curatorial offices are being moved off-site into rented space.
The weird, empty gap between the new building and the rest of the campus is ridiculous as well.
Stop wasting tax dollars !!
Turn the project over to
Diller, Scofidio + Renfro
Francisco Fernández
Los Angeles
I would be ok with Zumthor's big glass gallery (assuming all the technical details he never shows can be resolved) if he raised his building up 5 stories or so and placed the whole shebang OVER the old existing LACMA buildings.
Basic math says the lost 10,000 square feet cost $65,000 per square foot.
Sheer genius.
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