LACMA measurement issues,

The new director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Michael Govan has a huge desire to leave his mark, in terms of a major building, on the art, cultural and civic scene in Los Angeles. In the Not for profit and governmental circles, this is how one's genitalia are measured. The Gawd awful American wing that blocked William Pereira's early 1960's campus and defeated the museums openness to Wilshire was built almost three decades ago. It's been a long time since a LACMA Museum Director could claim huge genitalia, and while there was almost universal high regard for the hideous American Wing by the press and civic establishment when it was built, everyone almost instantly discovered that the emperor had no clothes and that the American Wing destroyed what grace of the Pereira campus was left.

Govan, rather than choose an local LA Architect of merit such as Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss, Fred Fisher, Mike Rotundi, Dean Nota, Wallace Cunningham, Chris Carr, Louis Wiehle, Michael Pinto, Julia Strickland, Duncan Nicholson, Helana Arahuete, or Vaughn Trammell, or a American Architect of Merit outside of LA such as Ken Kellog, Anthony Puttnam, Josh Safdie, David E. Dodge or say Bart Prince, went way way FAAR away and chose a man who views America and LA as strange exotic places, the Swiss Architect Peter Zumthor.

As a fifth generation Southern Californian, I admire in a way, the provincialism of the civic leaders two generations ago who chose William Pereira as our art museum Architect. That generation understood that one defined LA as a art capital not only by its collection of works of the past and present, but by having a local society capable of producing and making thrive, architectural talent at least as good as the collection that was being housed. All of the LA Architects I listed above have superior talent, at least the equal of anyone worldwide, no matter their awards or press reputation.

Pereira's original campus was open to Wilshire, was inviting, did have welcoming exterior spaces and the buildings could be sensitively adapted by even a mediocre Architect, to have movable partitions. Our technology is better today, we could make the multiple water elements work, even on the tar pits, and certainly the buildings can be retrofitted to be more energy efficient. All of this can be done for far lower a cost than the new building, even including building another nearby expanded display space. The reason not to do this, of course, goes right back to Mr. Govan and his measurement issues.

As to the Zumthor proposal itself, Mr. Zumthor is noted and has won design awards for his tight vertical rectilinear buildings. Mr. Zumthor seems to realize that much of Los Angeles Architecture from the 1950's on made use of long horizontal amoeba shaped buildings or portions of buildings. here in his LACMA proposal he attempts to fool us into believing he has been seduced by LA into a Architectural form that seems at first to have evolved from John Lautner. This is both an illusion and a insult to Mr. Lautner. In the case of Mr. Lautner, every form did actually arise, and could be easily seen to related, directly to a FUNCTION. Unless trickery is a function, the Zumthor building's amoeba shapes do not arise from function. They mainly serve to tie groups of rectilinear structures together. The Ameba shape just hides the fact that Zumthor is giving us several really dull vertical rectilinear rooms as a museum. There really is no difference between this and Pereira's original campus EXCEPT that Pereira's was conceived honestly and as a complete artistic expression with integrated water, hardscape, and landscape elements. Zumthor has not yet worked out what will be under his amoeba shapes, he plans seven stairwells to both support this thing thirty feet off ground level and be his access points, yet he has not worked these out in any detail. So we are being shown a series of incomplete sketches for a three quarter of a billion dollar building. Zumthor has no idea what the underside of his building will be or what the landscape interface will be. Frankly, this project as shown would get a "F" as incomplete in any Architectural design class.

I would like to respectfully submit that Mr. Zumthor's contract be ended at this point, and that the LACMA board hire a local preservation firm to design a preservation alternative that restores the Pereira campus, makes it energy efficient, allows gallery walls to move and finds an annex space nearby for more exhibit space, and also hire any one of the GREAT local LA or California Architects I have listed, many of whom worked either with Frank Lloyd Wright, John Lautner, Bruce Goff or a combination of those three, to come up with a completely new design. LA is a mature enough arts community to have the talent to do a  world class art museum and in fact, all of our local talent I have mentioned would turn out a much better museum plan than the present mediocre Zumthor sketch, that frankly it is embarrassing to see the press praise so highly, as they once praised the "American Wing".

As to Govan's measurement issue, he could attempt for a change to mount the kinds of world class exhibits LACMA had in the 1980's and 1990's, like the Soviet Constructivism exhibit, the Arts and Crafts in California exhibit, the Charles Rennie MacIntosh exhibit, the Clay army of the Chinese Emperor exhibit. Much as I love Architecture, the way I measure a museum is not primarily in its buildings, but in its exhibits, public outreach and programs. New building programs as the primary objective of any institution reflect a lack of imagination or commitment to core objectives, on the part of its board and executive director. That is the present measurement of LACMA.