Following a move from Purple to Red in California's tiered safety classification structure, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) will again open its doors to the public on Thursday after a year of lockdown that left the 60-year-old museum critically and financially uncertain as it looks to complete an ongoing $750 Million refurbishment project.
In advance of a new Peter Zumthor complex opposite the museum's original campus on Wilshire Boulevard, LACMA's COVID-19 experience has been marked by the demolition of several key structures on-site in April that have shrunk exhibition space significantly in preparation for the long-awaited new building complete with 110,000 square feet of "inclusive" galleries sheathed in glass and supported by seven pavilions that serve as hosts to the education, shopping and dining functions lost in the restructuring.
It's certainly been a long year for the museum, which had to sell Director Michael Govan's Hancock Park home, board member resignations, brutal criticism from a number of different sources that itself generated acclaim and included a failed effort to crowdsource an alternative design by a hostile citizen's group, although it did have some luck in securing a $6.7 Million PPP Loan that helped avert the staff layoffs and furloughs that have plagued many other cultural institutions during the pandemic.
Visitors to the museum will be expected to wear face coverings and submit a pre-entry online health screen in compliance with the County's guidelines. After taking a temperature check, visitors with timed-entry tickets will walk a one-way path through the galleries, where they can expect to see video installations by Cauleen Smith and Bill Viola, a retrospective of Japanese artist Yoshimito Nara, and an examination of the art of ventriloquism that spans three millennia––in addition to a show highlighting recent acquisitions to LACMA's collection including a portrait by Caldia Rawles, a hot name in the art market of late.
Foundation testing, as well as waterproofing and mating, will continue on the east side of the Wilshire construction site for the next few months. The new building, with its adjacent Metro Line station and Pritzker bonafides, is set to be completed at the end of 2023.
It will be interesting to see how the post-COVID LACMA is received by the city, but for now, its director says optimism abounds in spite of the negative press.
“We are delighted to welcome visitors back to the museum,” Govan said in a statement. “We have a diverse and exciting program of exhibitions that are sure to inspire visitors during these challenging times."
"We are thrilled to again be a source of respite, solace, and beauty for Angelenos” he added.
While the damage done to the museum in the public eye during the pandemic have left their mark, LACMA's focus remains on the year ahead and the new building. Renewed visitorship in hand, the future, like the sunshine leaking through the colonnade rows in Chris Burden's (still-intact) Urban Light appears very bright.
14 Comments
why is there no green roof on this? or even better a big swimming pool...
Putting a garden on the roof will be a nice opportunity for a future designer hired to adapt Zumthor's shitshow into a functional museum. If LACMA has any money left, that is.
I love how all of the aerial renders ignore the MEP stuff that's going to fill the pristine roof
good comment... huge missed opportunity to activate the rooftop as a public space. way more inviting than the 'undercroft' spaces outside. i'm reminded a bit of Gehry's facebook HQ which is a similarly large, sprawling structure with a wonderful rooftop garden.
The rooftop is the most salient aspect of an otherwise fairly nondescript design. It is also how many of us will know the building, from aerial shots. Cluttering it up will spoil the image.
it's such a wasted space... it's creating a new ground but there's nothing on it. hopefully the homeless find a way to get up there and set up an informal settlement. or they lease it out for drone parking.
They are in urgent need of new money through membership and donations. Nothing is going to happen until. I know a lot of people not renewing their membership. Existed museum is gone except for Renzo Piano's additions BCAM and Resnick Pavilion. They might be the only museum spaces for a long time to come for LACMA. The La Brea Tar Pits Park is an important part of LA's culture to be partially closed.
I don't wish a permanent construction fence around the demolished museum grounds but the new project pretty much hinging on Michael Govan's energy. If he is gone, destination unknown.
Last I heard they were in the $900m range for a building 10,000 sf smaller than the one the they demoloshed. I wonder how much of the collection they will have to sell to pay for this debacle - and to reduce space requirements.
It must've been the site plan that won the commission.
Is that post-digital?
More like post-mortem.
There's an object lesson in LACMA, perhaps a cautionary tale. I'd like to see someone follow the project up extensively, as we'd learn something about the state of culture and architecture today.
Either this design will become popular and make the site a cultural destination and attract large crowds. I debate the value of such a strategy, as it makes a museum an event space, detracting from the art and serious viewers. But if it brings attention—and money—the museum can increase its prestige and collection. And for better—and for worse—it may be the only way to go now.
Or the new museum will become a flop and a cash sinkhole, at the expense of the museum and LA. How long can the novelty of the design last? Do people want to drive to the museum and walk around a blob? (Probably, but for how long?) In which case, LA would have been better off with something more reserved and affordable to preserve the museum and its mission now and in the future.
The proposal has faltered in its first ambition:
Govan chose not to hold another competition. “It gets dangerous if you fail,” he told me. In order to raise the money that a new building would require—an unprecedented amount in Los Angeles, where cultural philanthropy doesn’t confer the social rewards that it does elsewhere—he needed to offer something dazzling: a forever building, with a motivating story to accompany it. “It had to be a compelling concept, because we were going to have to raise money the likes of which we had never seen,” he told me. “
From Dana Goodyear's piece in The NY, "The Iconoclast Remaking Los Angeles’s Most Important Museum," worth a read.
As for the design itself—
“Most architecture in Los Angeles is quite temporary-feeling,” Govan said. “Built with sticks. What L.A. needed, and what would stand out next to the primordial quality of the tar pits and the ancientness of our collections, was gravitas and real materials.” The building should look old, excavated rather than superimposed—something that “feels like it was there forever and should be there forever.”
His comment is somewhat attractive but more suspicious, if not incoherent and downright hokey. I don't see gravitas in the design. We still don't know what it will look like exactly, though I wouldn't be surprised whatever gravitas it can muster and material effect are lost. Concessions will have to be made, and SOM will step in and make them.
Zumthor is an interesting guy, his own man, not a typical architect. Goodyear fills in his background. Given time, in his element, he can produce interesting work. But I'm not sure he's in his element in LA. I wouldn't be surprised his relationship with Govan is horribly problematic, to the detriment of whatever he might have accomplished on his own. Plus he has never handled anything on this scale before.
In the mean time, each post on LACMA should begin with that schmaltzy dramatic organ chord they used to play in soap operas.
As the LACMA Turns. . . .
The 'building as a draw' fails for multiple reasons, not the least of which is ignoring the purpose of a museum. The difficulty of fundraising shows how poorly conceived the project is. And it's not going to be easy to increase the collection with 10,000 sf less space and a nearly $1 billion dollar construction - money that could have been put into art, programming, etc. - all of which would draw people and future investment.
Its not even an flashy, iconic-looking design like what LA is used to - Getty, Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Broad. Zumthor is exactly the opposite of all these and unfortunately he's turned in a design that doesn't seem to bear any of his hallmarks, after all the VE that got rid of the clerestory lighting and double height interior spaces. Essentially LACMA hired their preferred starchitect to do a design that is as unassuming as it gets yet obnoxiously invasive while negating the architect's strengths.
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