“We have this museum district,” says architect and theorist Dana Cuff, who oversees cityLAB, an urban research and design center at UCLA, “but the stuff that holds everything together is the part we call the city, and that is the part that Los Angeles has never gotten right.” — The Los Angeles Times
Carolina Miranda of The Los Angeles Times reports that despite a number of new and forthcoming institutional expansions coming to the Miracle Mile museum district in Los Angeles, the area's urban design is sorely lacking.
The problem, according to Miranda, is worse by the fact that the designers and directors of the forthcoming building projects, which include Atelier Zumthor's Los Angeles County Museum of Art overhaul, have largely ignored a planned subway extension slated for the district.
Miranda writes, "all of the development raises concerns about how the architectural pieces—and, more important, the public spaces around them—will come together after the last nail has been banged into place."
Dana Cuff of UCLA's CityLAB tells Miranda, “There is no there there,” adding, “there is no urban design that has been created for this chunk of Wilshire that will be one of the most pedestrian and populated parts of the city.”
The simple fact is that even if LACMA turns out to be a stellar success, it's still a success plopped down into a hostile streetscape that lacks a coherent neighborhood vision. Without a real effort at urbanism, the best this district can hope for is a hodgepodge of adjacent icons that cry for individual attention while drowning out each other. ...Which, I suppose, has always been the best and worst thing about Los Angeles in many ways.
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The criticism here is getting out of control. There is no doubt the plan here is better than what is currently existing. The museum, plaza, public stop is an improvement. Like much contemporary pop arch criticism, it seems to be completely off the radar.
The architect and institutions only have so much power over the "urban planning." That would require the city to do something truly transformative (a sunken street, perhaps). As it is, the architects are doing as much as they can in a design-phobic civic realm, and creating a space that is getting more and more watered down the more they listen to criticism that is coming from somewhere else.
The whole issue of "white male" architects is separate but important. It would be great if local, diverse LA designers were used, but the power structure isn't just white male centric, but focused on Europeans over Americans. However, that ignores the quality of this project per se, which features two of the best Euros. So what can you do. The issue seems to be more the larger relationship of public and design than this project itself.
I think you're misreading this article as a criticism of Zumthor (et al) when in fact it's a criticism of Los Angeles.
The simple fact is that even if LACMA turns out to be a stellar success, it's still a success plopped down into a hostile streetscape that lacks a coherent neighborhood vision. Without a real effort at urbanism, the best this district can hope for is a hodgepodge of adjacent icons that cry for individual attention while drowning out each other. ...Which, I suppose, has always been the best and worst thing about Los Angeles in many ways.
YAWN
When I studied in Detroit back in the late 70s, the running joke was that every great architect came there to do their worst building. Los Angeles may be a close second. The building mass of Zumthor's LACMA looks much like a lava lamp leaked across the site than a serious response to anything in particular -- more LACLESS than LACMA.
Most cities only build small or bigger architectural islands and hope urban infrastructure will coherently fill in the gaps. They do get filled, but hardly ever tie back to the islands as seamlessly as they should. And so, the parts of what makes a city a city remain discrete parts, and there is hardly any whole that's greater than the sum of them. In instances where entire cities are built from scratch, the architecture usually still drives the urban design.
This is the long-standing contemporary urban designer's lament.
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