The Ahmanson Building is the last standing structure of four buildings being demolished at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The Leo S. Bing Center is completely gone; construction workers are removing the foundations of the Hammer and Art of the Americas buildings.
Demolition of the Ahmanson began this week, museum representative Jessica Youn said Tuesday, and should be completed “in the last quarter” of this year.
— The Los Angeles Times
Workers have made swift progress demolishing the history William L Pereira and Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates-designed buildings on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art campus.
Demolition of Los Angeles County Art Museum @LACMA continues @MiracleMileLA #LosAngeles @KNX1070 pic.twitter.com/VSjbdILB8V
— Frank Mottek (@frankmottek) August 11, 2020
Of the three existing buildings, two have been wiped away with the third currently undergoing demolition. LACMA envisions completing the demolition of the existing buildings sometime toward the end of 2020 so that work on the Atelier Peter Zumthor-designed replacement structures can begin. A completion date for that project has yet to be announced.
16 Comments
I just hope I live long enough to see Zummy's shart demolished and replaced with something designed in whatever the Instagrammy style of 30 years from now is.
the disrespect of Peter Zumthor on this site continues to amaze me.
My guess is that you do not know anything about LA, or LACMA. Zumthor's design is wasteful, antiseptic and self-serving. At the least, he could have proposed saving some of the existing, beautiful structures, in the same way that Renzo Piano did. Instead, we will soon have a uni dimensional turd endorsed by Brad Pitt and Diane Keyton.
I'm a LACMA member and live in the Los Angeles area. I'm very much looking forward to a Zumthor in Los Angeles.
You are correct that I don't know anything about Louisiana.
Do people who live in Los Angeles not say "LA" the way people from SF don't say "Frisco" or "San Fran"?
No, most of us do say "LA", only the pretentious pricks dont.
SP—almost everyone in LA that I know calls LA "LA".... someone is just being a bit cheeky. :D
hey drums… didn’t know you were a fellow angeleno. that’s dope.
I have mixed feelings about the Zumthor project.
On one hand, I’m excited to have a Zumthor project in my backyard, but on the other hand I’m afraid its at too large of a scale to really appreciate the subtleties that his studio is so well known for.
For starers, do we think the concrete will be pigmented, or painted? I mean at the end of the day who is really going to care, but I think the point of hiring an architect like Zumthor should be how authentic their concept is both to themselves and the site. That's why we love him, right? Contemporary vernacular. Kenneth Frampton's wet dream.
Also, am I the only person that thinks the renderings on the long elevations with floor to ceiling glass is a completely ludicrous curatorial / design decision? I mean regardless of how you try to spin it by showing solar diagrams or having some super special (and expensive) glass, it just seems to fly in the face of all logic for how one displays art, no?
Indirect light from skylights or diffusers much? Like…. did you look at the fucking Piano building right next door, Pete? As meh as I find most of Renzo Piano’s work at the very least he’s consistent across his museums in attempting to deal with indirect lighting.
It’s also HILARIOUS that this all began when the board asked to come up with proposals to renovate the exiting structure for under $200 million. The actual cost to do it jumped to $400 million, so LACMA was like FUCK IT LET’S JUST GO FOR IT and decide to arbitrarily pick Zumthor and now the cost is suddenly $750 million.
Again, if this was Guggenheim building its LA outpost I wouldn’t care, but this is funded by a good portion taxpayer money and even more form private donors in a city where we have 70,000 people living in worse conditions than a Syrian refugee camp.
It really goes to show that this city ain't much different than what was depicted in it's early days in movies like Chinatown with Jack Nicholson.
Bets for how far over a billion this thing ends up?
I’m being an ass, but my bet is $1.19 billion.
Id say more like 1.5 all said and all done. Still cannot figure out why overlord Zumthor couldn't save some of the existing buildings.
lol yeah you’re probably right.
Last article I read says that with 10% increase in construction costs the project is already at $825 million, so yeah… since the budget already TRIPLED why not just DOUBLE that $750 and make it $1.5 billion.
As far as saving the buildings, yes, I was praying that there was a viable path forward through adaptive re-use. I understand that the existing structures were in awful condition and the museum claims that renovating them would be “cost prohibitive” but then here I am seeing that now they have a budget shortfall of pretty close to $250 million, which is just over the $246 million that they claim the retrofit project would have cost them. Cost prohibitive to renovate but cool with over a billion for new museum?
U FCKN WOT M8
That all said I’m still not sure how much we will really be on the hook for this one. Sources say $125 million of public money is already allocated for the project—again—half of the cost that LACMA officially cites as the price of the retrofit. My numbers could be off but I really wish there was more transparency.
honestly this is looking no better than a lot of billion dollar stadium projects that use public money for their projects with ballooning budgets.
I’d personally rather have a Zumthor museum than a stadium but that’s just me.
tbh the worst of it all is the blathering and self-congratulatory PR behind the entire project.
“Concrete was chosen to give the building a sublime aesthetic character and beautiful sense of gravitas. Concrete walls have been utilized successfully in other museums like the Kimbell, the Guggenheim, and Kunsthaus Bregenz. Not one artist whose work was displayed at Bregenz has ever covered that museum's walls with sheetrock. Additionally, many objects and antiquities in our collection originated in buildings or other settings built from stone, so it is particularly fitting to display them in concrete-walled galleries.”
I have a deep admiration for Zumthor’s work and I’m excited to have a project of his in Los Angeles, but this is pure stuntin’.
i think the issue of displaying art in indirect light is going to be a moot point. the collection will be digitized, the originals sold to help fund construction, and the digital collection will be displayed on screens or prints. this will facilitate rapid changes to the arrangement of artworks which will keep the curator happily busy.
Maybe they can finish in time for another earthquake. Great waste of taxpayers dollars
Angelenos, represent.
On naming and what to call it: the only time I use words and not letters is when I'm elsewhere and worry I might sound like a douche for abbreviating ("oh, I'm from El Lay.") Not a common occasion.
Otherwise, it's just too many damned syllables: El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula.
I hate to say it, but a world class museum needs world class architecture. Wish they could have figured out a plan to reuse the old buildings--they seemed to be well like by those that visited. Wish they could have gone with the earlier black zumthor plan. But it seems to me they had no choice -- new building or irrelevance. Just like every university, museum, architect, corporation -- publish or perish.
"a world class museum needs world class architecture." It's a shame they didn't get that this time.
Yeah, this is not world class. They chose a (really good) Home architect to design a museum
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