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As the museum turns 50 this year and debate continues about LACMA Director Michael Govan's plan to replace the Pereira buildings (and a later addition by Hugh Hardy) with a giant new wing by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, it's worth remembering how the original LACMA campus was greeted — as well as a few things about the Los Angeles into which it was born. — latimes.com
Related: Christopher Hawthorne dissects Zumthor's inkblot with LACMA Director Michael Govan View full entry
For the latest edition of Working out of the Box Archinect talked with Abraham Burickson, founder of Odyssey Works. He explained "Architecture school required total commitment, and in Odyssey Works that’s the case as well – absolute, total commitment. Because otherwise nothing new is... View full entry
It’s been a strange week, especially in Indiana. On this episode, before getting to the RFRA-ff, we hit on a neat architectural inversion: LA-heavyweight Morphosis designs a "middle-finger" luxury tower in the quaint mountain town of Vals, Switzerland, while the subtly grand Swiss museum-master... View full entry
Since opening the doors of its original William Pereira buildings in 1965, the Los Angele County Museum of Art has grown along with its home. The version of the city beloved by Reyner Banham and Pereira was alive then on the historic Miracle Mile, proselytizing megasized car-infrastructure and New... View full entry
Once a free-flowing, biomorphic design inspired by the La Brea Tar Pits and the work of the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, the design has become noticeably more angular and muscular in recent weeks. It now features double-height galleries made of white or light-gray concrete and poking up above the roofline of the rest of the museum [...]
"No one will call it a blob anymore," LACMA Director Michael Govan said ... "Peter hasn't given up the curve. But he's really, really reined it in."
— latimes.com
Related news: Peter Zumthor pushes LACMA redesign to the curb to make room for tar pitsL.A. County supervisors approve initial funding for new LACMA buildingPeter Zumthor's $450,000,000 'Black Flower' for LACMA View full entry
Located in Garden Valley, Nevada, Michael Heizer’s City is one of the most significant works of art in the United States. Begun by Heizer in 1972, the project is now in its final stage of completion. It will, in the future, be accessible by the public. [...]
To see the land developed into a site for military, energy, or waste purposes, would ruin it forever. After 43 years of work, can it really be destroyed like this?
— unframed.lacma.org
Notable American museums publicly expressed their support on Twitter via #protectCITY. The LACMA petition to protect Michael Heizer's City and the Basin and Range can be reached here.Previously on Archinect: Michael Heizer's massive desert sculpture, "City", will make you cry View full entry
Friday, November 7:8,000 Glowing Balloons Recreate the Berlin Wall: A 10 mile chain of balloons will line the path where the Wall previously stood, to commemorate the 25th anniversary of its demolition.First Ever Chicago Architecture Biennial Taking Shape for 2015: The Biennial's theme of "The... View full entry
The Board of Supervisors has approved a road map for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as it plans a $600-million makeover that would tear down and rebuild most of its Miracle Mile campus [...].
If there are no serious bumps in the road ahead, the plan would yield a streamlined, curving 410,000-square-foot new museum building designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor that would open in 2023, spanning Wilshire Boulevard with an enclosed bridge that doubles as gallery space.
— latimes.com
Previously View full entry
“He didn’t like people coming into the studio and seeing the paintings before they were finished,” he said. “This is one of the most ambitious artworks ever envisioned, certainly in the United States.”
Heizer's mammoth masterpiece in the desert is called "City."
“It was in 1994 when I first saw it, unfinished,” Govan said. “You do cry. You think, what an incredibly beautiful ambition.”
— ksl.com
“People used to complain that people went to New York to buy what they could buy in LA,” said Kathy Halbreich, the associate director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “I don’t think that happens anymore. I think there’s a recognition that the city matters, that the people aren’t just there for the weather. You see a level of ambition that’s been ratcheted up.” — theguardian.com
Movies can be great. Art can be great. But put them together in a museum exhibition, and the combination can be not-so-great. [...]
A new exhibition of early 20th-century cinema at the L.A. County Museum of Art (LACMA), however, rethinks that equation. [...]
Designed by Amy Murphy, a professor of architecture at USC, and Michael Maltzan of Michael Maltzan Architecture, the exhibition design is the antithesis of the traditional framed-stuff-on-a-wall model.
— latimes.com
It would be better to reconsider this wholesale demolition. Especially as the proposed replacement, designed by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, leaves much to be desired. [...] Or maybe it’s the quintessential Angeleno building? After all, replacing an aging faithful spouse with a younger, more stylish trophy wife is an established Hollywood custom. — Zócalo Public Square
"We're working with the other owners of the property and with Metro," said LACMA Director Michael Govan. "There's good reason to build a major development there. You've got subway access and density on Wilshire. My dream is some beautiful piece of architecture with an architecture and design museum at the base, which would add to Museum Row."
If built, the tower would offer a dramatic vertical complement to the relentlessly horizontal LACMA gallery building by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor
— latimes.com
How's this for a yin-yang in the new Los Angeles: if this goes through, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) would be responsible for two majorly different impositions on Wilshire Blvd., the city's foremost thoroughfare and itself an icon. One: a street-straddling horizontal art... View full entry
Nicholas Korody penned a review - The Trouble with a Bird’s Eye View. The piece dissects a summer exhibition of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Design. He concludes the pairing of aerial photographs by Los Angeles-based Lane Barden with a geo-mapping project by the German-American... View full entry
Architect Peter Zumthor has dramatically revised his design for a new Los Angeles County Museum of Art, creating a new bridge-like section of the building that would span Wilshire Boulevard.
The new design is meant to address concerns that the original plan would encroach on, and potentially damage, the La Brea Tar Pits at the neighboring Page Museum, casting a shadow over the largest pit.
— latimes.com
