The newest design for the LACMA campus, masterminded by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, has received more criticism than your average museum expansion. LA Times writer Christopher Knight had some choice words about the futile nature of the proposal while Kate Wagner has dismissed it as little more than "a museum that benefits nobody and satisfies none of the needs of the art in its collection, nor of the public that will view it."
In response, LACMA has dedicated a space to the exhibition of the new plan with a 15-foot model built in Zumthor's studio. The site model is a single slab of molded cement, reproducing several blocks of the Miracle Mile with abstracted precision to focus attention on an all-white volumetric model of the LACMA addition.
The exhibition is held in a space formerly reserved for Art Catalogues in the part of the campus that will soon be demolished, and includes a wall graphic with a history of the many alterations the LACMA campus faced since it first opened in 1965.
10 Comments
Hahhaha what a fucking joke
The colors are inverted too ... The context should be white and the building beige.
Guess a beige massing model doesn't look good even from a bird's eye view. Where are the plans?
i love the support structure below the model. someone got crafty and clever there.
They put far more effort into the production of that model than they did the shitty design for the museum.
Either that or the are really shitty designers.
The model is worthless for anything other than a PR stunt. Even making the make the rest of the city look like a ruin doesn't improve the appearance of the terrible design.
Aside from the fact that the model is useless for design purposes, too, which has been replaced by flat screen projections of false reality. Models tell truths that digital models can't, which is why they are presented as spectacle with the experience of the building hidden rather than exposed.
I finally get it - the design is representative of a massive ejaculate on the LACMA campus! Bravo Zumthor!
This process seems to be designed to elicit the most hate possible -- if they had stuck with the original nobody would have cared. Maybe stoking controversy is the new thing? Like that Google Toronto project?
Every single thing about this model is pure 90's era Cranbrook. It would be a dream come true to still spend my days as an architect making the same stuff I made in a grad school monastery 24 years ago.
No clients, no budgets, no CDs, no CA ... Heaven!
For me, the lessons of Cranbrook are the importance of outdoor spaces designed together with the buildings and the architects of new structures making an effort to relate to older adjacent buildings. Zumthor does neither at LACMA. The groovy concrete model does not excuse the incompetent design.
I'm sorry, thisisnotmyname, I wasn't clear. I meant the student work of the MArch studio in the late 80s and 90s, not the Cranbrook campus facility itself. The Cranbrook campus is one of the most magical places on the planet - even the best-case scenario LACMA, even if it turns out to be really really good, won't be comparable to it.
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