In response to the recent superstar competition for the redesign of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Forum presents a special feature on LACMA, LACMA on Fire: The Curator against the City by Forum board member Paulette Singley and Cathedrals of the Culture Industry by Forum board member Kazys Varnelis.
This article is the second in a series for the journal Pasajes de Arquitectura y Critica [Madrid] examining the relationship of a spectacularized contemporary architecture, the city, and capital. The other two are: "Hallucination in Seattle. Frank Gehry's Experience Music Project," Pasajes de Arquitectura y Critica,June 2001 and "A Brief History of Horizontality: 1968/1969 to 2001/2002," March 2003.
Arriving in Los Angeles in 1996, I was struck by its lack of significant civic monuments. Only the diminutive Isozaki MOCA [Museum of Contemporary Art], huddled beneath the improbably tall skyscrapers of downtown and compromised by being forced largely underground, hinted that compelling monumental architecture might be a proper aspiration for a city. Indeed, it has always seemed ironic that historically, the home base of what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer called "the culture industry," has been unconcerned with its own appearance. While New York and Chicago invented skyscrapers to represent their aspirations, Los Angeles remained content without significant monuments or even compelling tourist attractions. Perhaps no physical embodiment could represent the myth of Hollywood. Perhaps to try, and thereby risk failing, was something the Industry could not allow itself. Complicating matters was the anti-urban position of real estate developers and civic boosters. Promoting the city as the locus of an idealized suburban lifestyle meant repressing any idea of the city as an urban center with public amenities. [1] Whatever the reason, the city's inability to develop a civic expression always lent it an air of transience, as if to underscore the ephemeral nature and fleeting importance of show business.
Today, however, Los Angeles promises a dramatic reversal, transforming itself into a cultural destination of the first order, adorned with architectural monuments to house its cultural institutions and announce its presence on the world stage. The reshaping of the city began with the 1997 opening of Richard Meier's $1 billion+ Getty Center and reaches a crescendo this fall with the consecration of Rafael Moneo's Cathedral of our Lady of the Angels and the inauguration of Frank Gehry's Disney Concert Hall. Together with Rem Koolhaas/OMA's proposal for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, an expansion of the Museum of Natural History by Steven Holl, an intervention into the UCLA/Hammer Museum of Art by Michael Maltzen, and the renovation of the Getty Museum in Malibu by Machado and Silvetti, Los Angeles is becoming a destination worthy of even the most sophisticated connoisseur of the global neo-avant-garde. What a contrast to the pages of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which Adorno and Horkheimer, exiled to the city in the 1940s damned the entertainment business for caring about nothing more than the bottom-line, producing easily digestible and vapid pieces for consumption by the docile masses. [2] How, then, might a city defined by this watering-down of culture into a transient froth come to reconceive itself as a showcase of architecture, the most permanent of art forms?
Rather than remaining an event of merely local importance, Los Angeles's abandonment of its bottom-line mentality to metamorphose from a featureless field of sprawl into a horizontal museum of international architecture reflects the newfound alliance between neo-avant-garde architecture, museums, and cities. In this, perhaps, Los Angeles is merely a laggard. Regardless how late, the "Bilbao-effect" has finally hit Los Angeles.
The museum is the crux in this transition. For not only is the contemporary city conceived of as a dispersed museum of neo-avant-garde monuments, these are dominated by the typology of the museum. This is a surprising about-face, for until recently the museum defined itself in opposition to the present. When Jean Cocteau stated "The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends," he succinctly summed up the museum of old. Presenting in columned halls the accomplishments of cultures past, museums served as monuments, embodying collective achievements of nations while demonstrating the reach of empires through a display of their plundered loot. But beyond that representational role, the early museum sought to transform the citizen-subject. Appearing at the birth of modernity, museums served to align the newly invented nation-state with higher, universal values by teaching these eternal truths to the public. Contemplation of the aesthetic object removed from its physical and functional context would allow bourgeois subjects to develop the refined taste and understanding of the ideal previously possessed only by the aristocracy. With the process of nation-building complete by the early twentieth century, however, the museum's role became largely obsolete. Apart from a handful of polemically-oriented museums of modern art, museums became storehouses of history, Cocteau's morgues. Cultural production became dominated by the culture industry and its products for mass consumption or by a vanishingly small avant-garde, possessing a polemical critique that by its nature could only be understood by a select few. So, too, when advocates of the avant-garde created museums of their own, they retained the museum's élite stance, verifying their cultural superiority through their ability to appreciate works the uncouth public saw as too difficult or too dissonant. [3]
Today the art museum no longer speaks with the condescending voice of a benevolent élite but rather joins the culture industry to address the public as a market, enticing audiences with popular exhibits and an architecturally stunning environment in which the museum's stores and restaurants are as important a draw as the works of art. No longer is it enough merely to house the past in dignified quarters: the contemporary museum must be not so much distinguished as distinctive. Today, virtually every museum commission, regardless of size, seeks a work by a cutting-edge architect to ensure the a barrage of media coverage that can draw maximum attendance. [4] As if to assert their global significance, museums in smaller cities aggressively court an international pantheon of architects as well. The list of architects for commissions in second-tier American cities alone tells a narrative of cultural aspirations: the Toledo Museum of Art's Center for Glass will be by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, the Milwaukee Museum of Art will be expanded by Santiago Calatrava, the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, Akron's Museum of Art by Coop Himmelblau, Cincinnati's Contemporary Art Center by Zaha Hadid and so on. The LACMA competition itself invited solely signature firms: Koolhaas, Morphosis, Steven Holl, Daniel Libeskind, and Jean Nouvel. Corporate architects no longer need apply for major museum commissions.
The result is attractive not only to museum administrators and donors, but also to local governments and tourist bureaus. After all, the Guggenheim Museum's branch in Bilbao has succeeded wildly, drawing in huge crowds and promoting tourism in the formerly depressed backwater town. Nearly 500,000 foreign tourists visited the complex in 2001 and even following September 11 it suffered only a minor dip in attendance.
As radical as the new focus on the museum's appearance is the revolution in curatorship. No longer do museums act as caretakers of their collections, cultivating a devoted local following; they must exhibit growth in attendance and revenues or be considered failures. The need to fill halls, necessary to both justify and pay for the new structures, has accompanied a curatorial populism meant to draw big crowds. Not only do museums turn to blockbuster exhibits of Van Gogh, Picasso, Rembrandt and the other familiar names, more and more they mount shows on themes previously considered "low" or outside the purview of the art museum. The "Art of the Motorcycle" at the Guggenheim Bilbao proved the success of such a strategy, drawing in the fifteenth biggest daily audience worldwide in 2000. The danger is obvious: does luring in crowds come at the expense of attention to permanent collections or the teaching mission of the institution?
Even more controversial is the policy of "deaccessioning" or selling works, often to help pay for new construction. Pioneered by Guggenheim director Thomas Krens, deaccessioning gave museums a new source of revenue, but it also compromised the museum's autonomy, tying it more closely to a postmodern economy in which culture was thoroughly permeated by capital.
A recent New York Times article by Deborah Solomon raises questions about the sustainability of the Guggenheim. While the Guggenheim Bilbao continues its success with a show on Frank Gehry that was the most well-attended in the museum's history, taken as a whole the Guggenheim has run into difficulties. The Guggenheim Las Vegas, designed by the superteam of Koolhaas and Gehry failed to draw the anticipated crowds. Coupled with declining revenues from the Manhattan location after the terrorist attacks this caused a financial crisis at the museum forcing Krens to slash its annual operating budget from $49 million in 2001 to $25.9 million in 2002, lay off 79 of its employees, about a fifth of the staff, close a branch in SoHo and postpone a number of major shows. More seriously, from 1998 to 2001, Krens has dipped into the museum's endowment to cover operating expenses, precipitating a decline from $55.6 million in 1998 to $38.9 million at the end of 2001. Even so, the museum continues to plan for a $680 million branch on the East River in lower Manhattan, yet another Gehry designed project. Krens doesn't see this as a contradiction: "It's easier to raise money for a building than a show. A building is permanent." [5] Should the lower Manhattan Guggenheim be built, the long-term feasibility of the Bilbao branch may be in question. With a much larger version in a city obviously far richer in other tourist amenities, will vacationers still flock to Bilbao?
With the economic sustainability of contemporary museum expansion strategies an open question, what of the architecture? What does this spectacular proliferation of neo-avant-garde objects mean? Although it is almost fifty years old, André Malraux's "Museum Without Walls" gives us a prescient model for not only today's curatorial practices but also for the consequences of the global proliferation of the neo-avant-garde museum. With the invention of the color photolithographic plate Malraux believed a supermuseum of art had been created, its collection encompassing any work of art that could be photographed:
Where the nineteenth century museum removed objects from their contexts to subject them to a coherent narrative imposed by the state's experts, unleashing the image from any physicality made it possible for us to classify and reclassify works of art according to our desires, a process that anticipates the search function of the Internet image bank. For here, in the steady glow of the computer monitor, a pornographic fascination with the image can be played out: masterpiece after masterpiece march in an endless parade across the screen. This too is the model for the art museum of the 21st century: concern with establishing enduring narratives of historical periods gives way to short-term blockbuster shows drawing together art from sources around the globe, temporary thematic exhibits that aim to recontextualize works, and new media such as video art, computer-based art, and Internet art allowing shows to be mounted simply through the loading of appropriate data. The art museum's model is no longer that of the tomb, it is that of the data bank. Once again, Thomas Krens proves to be the most ambitious museum director, hiring Studio Asymptote to undertake a much-trumpeted but never-opened project for a Virtual Guggenheim that would exist on the Internet.
Given that they are unwilling to act as storehouses of collective memory, today's museums cannot act as traditional monuments. The volatile memory stored within the museum-databank is subject to disappearance if the power – of leveraged multinational capital - is switched off. Like databanks, today's museums can be anywhere: they occupy a placeless continuum and engage in dialogue with each other across continents more easily than across town. The self-contained nature of the contemporary museum leads it to disengage from the city fabric – here the Getty Center's perch atop a hill approachable only by freeway is exemplary. And if the Guggenheim Bilbao initially appears to have a greater connection to the city, its most remarkable aspect is that this is a ruse: the museum has virtually no architectural influence on Bilbao beyond the park on the banks of the Nervion.
Reading an urban environment as a museum-city inevitably means ignoring the urban context, which exists only as a place to buy dinner and shop for clothes. The only continuity discernable between its isolated structures is through reproduction, either in a series in a monograph or in comparison drawn by some critic. But here again, the emphasis is more on a relationship between products scattered across the globe or at best across a city. Traditional typological boundaries break down in our attempt to understand the products of the museum-city: their function as contemporary architectural masterworks overcomes traditional divisions between concert hall, airport, and museum. Only thus can Disney Concert Hall be compared to the Guggenheim Bilbao. What is important now is only that the object be recognizable and distinct.
The reconfiguration of the contemporary city as a field of isolated masterworks is anticipated by the interest in autonomous form that emerged during the 1970s, not incidentally the decade of professional adolescence for today's superstar architects. With the defeat of modernism, the neo-avant-garde of that day turned to the only strategy that could give relevance to architecture: affirming its right to exist through formal games to display in the gallery. Manfredo Tafuri described the scene: "It is no wonder then, that the most strongly felt condition today belongs to those who realize that, in order to salvage specific values for architecture, the only course is to make use of 'battle remnants,' that is, to redeploy what has been discarded on the battlefield that has witnessed the defeat of the avant-garde." [7] Thirty years later, today's knights have no battle to fight. Buoyed by the museum industry's belief that neo-avant-garde architecture is necessary for maintaining the bottom-line, architecture seems to have a function in society again. Thus today's neo-avant-garde abandons the melancholic irony of the "exasperated objects," as Tafuri called them, of the 1970s or the "violated perfection" of the 1980s. Aldo Rossi's idea of the building as emptied sign is gone: there is no meaning to evacuate. Architecture is now utterly self-referential, proclaiming its success, the victory of pure form.
What has been lost in all this is the possibility of architecture as an agent of social change. The ancient role of architecture to represent the sacred has been resurrected, only now rather than God, we worship the alliance of culture and industry that creates a new global order and gives architecture relevance.
The result is not so much a field of monuments but a field of tombs. Adolf Loos suggested that architecture as art could only be found in that which evades the everyday: the monument, the creation of an artificial memory, and i>the tomb, the illusion of a universe beyond death. [8]The museum buildings of today certainly do little to represent the contents of the volatile databank within and, given the rapid obsolescence of architectural fashion – one of the buildings that OMA proposes to tear down at LACMA is a fifteen year old structure by Hardy, Holzmann, Pfeiffer – these structures may not be around for long in any event. Rather, a virtual world is created in which architecture is the most significant of arts and its products lord over the city as cathedrals did. Where Loos's tomb presented an order beyond death, the museum-city presents a utopian dream of architecture, profoundly relevant to society through the heroism of its forms alone.
To comprehend the neo-avant-garde's role in society, Tafuri turned to Walter Benjamin's essay "The Author as Producer." [9] As Benjamin explained, what ultimately matters is not the attitude of a work to the conditions of its day but rather its function in them. Thus, Tafuri found the debates of his day to be merely peripheral and pointless: with the task of planning taken from it by economists, architecture's relevancy was gone, it had become a thing of the past. Adopting Benjamin's method today, we read the contemporary monument as demonstrating the global economic order of late capitalism in which the construction of museums and large-scale real-estate investment are compatible. No longer does Los Angeles need to rely on Disneyworld or Jon Jerde's Universal Citywalk: these are the monuments of a less sophisticated time. The culture industry is now strong enough and hungry enough to absorb the neo-avant-garde. But the impact of all this great architecture on the city fabric is fleeting. The exasperated objects of Piranesi's Campo Marzio plan, which Tafuri read as an anticipation of the 1970s neo-avant-garde, have been replaced by self-contained jewels punctuating Koolhaas's junkspace.
Turning back to LACMA, we should follow Benjamin to ask not what this project means but rather how it will be funded and why. For if the LACMA competition signifies anything, it is the ascendancy of the city's elite to global status. The museum expects that a large part of the construction will be financed by billionaire Eli Broad and, in turn, the structure is seen as a prerequisite for the display of his collection. But the source of Broad's riches reveals the ruse of contemporary architecture's success. Known as "the King of Sprawl," Broad made his riches by building more cut-rate homes in suburban America between the late 1950s and 1980s than anyone else. As a founder of Kaufman Broad (now KB) Homes, Broad did more to create the contemporary condition of suburban sprawl, than anyone else. Now over the last twenty years, Broad has increasingly dissociated himself from home-building, managing a large insurance firm instead. But Broad's shift is the product of the home market becoming too risky for investment, not because of a moral transformation. Today, however, Broad proclaims sprawl too expensive and hopes to underwrite a transformation within Los Angeles. Not only has he promised funds for LACMA, he served as founding chairman of MOCA and also raised tens of millions to ensure that the Disney Concert Hall would be built. Although it would be easy to see this public beneficence on Broad's part as penance, akin to the building of cathedrals by barons to justify the pillaging of the surrounding countryside, he insists that this is not the case. [10]
What then is the rationale behind Broad's decision to fund Los Angeles's transformation into a museum-city? More broadly, what is the ultimate consequence of the museum-city for architecture and urbanism? In its emphasis on the singular object, the museum-city acts to reinforce the persona of the hero-patron, such as Broad. The museum-city also domesticates any transformative force claimed by architecture, reducing it to a producer of affect for a greatly expanded culture industry. Disconnected from the field of sprawl they punctuate, the monuments of the museum-city serve as an alibi, paying lip-service to the idea of the urban environment even as they take attention away from everyday life in the city and its increasing unaffordability. When it is economically feasible to revive city centers, they are taxidermized, turned into historic districts functioning primarily as tourist attractions or playgrounds for the global elite. But if the city becomes nothing more than isolated historic districts and monuments in the sprawl, even if the cathedrals of the culture industry have funded the neo-avant-garde with lucrative jobs for the moment, what will become of the profession if the fashion for architecture passes? [11]
Notes:
[1] In Los Angeles, the movie business is commonly called "the Industry."
[2] Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1969).
[3] Ortega y Gasset's attack on modernism is a response to this, as is the sociological analysis of Pierre Bourdieu. No matter how brilliant the latter, it is of limited use for us today given the changed condition of the museum described below.
[4] A personal anecdote illustrates the situation: I was consulted by representatives of a new museum in a small American city recently to aid them in their choice of an architect. Above all, I was instructed, they wanted guaranteed front page coverage in the Arts Section of the New York Times.
[5] Deborah Solomon, "Is the Go-Go Guggenheim Going, Going É" The New York Times (June 30, 2002).
[6] André Malraux, The Voices of Silence, trans. Stuart Gilbert, Bollingen Series, no 24 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 44, 46.
[7] Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1987), 267
[8] Adolf Loos "Architecture," 1910. Roberto Schezen, ed. Adolf Loos: Architecture 1903-1932, (New York: Monacelli, 1996), 15. Mine is very much a Tafurian reading of Loos, see Tafuri, 375.
[9] Walter Benjamin, "The Author as Producer", Reflections (New York: Harcourt Brace: 1978), 220-38.
[10] Mark Arax, "Convention is Just an Introduction to Eli Broad's vision of Downtown; Once the King of Sprawl, Billionaire Turns his Sights to Reviving the City's Heart," The Los Angeles Times, August 6, 2000.
[11] See also the questions raised in Joe Day's essay for the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design website, MEIERED, MoCA's recent exhibition What's Shakin: New Architecture in LA.
[9] Walter Benjamin, "The Author as Producer", Reflections (New York: Harcourt Brace: 1978), 220-38.
[10] Mark Arax, "Convention is Just an Introduction to Eli Broad's vision of Downtown; Once the King of Sprawl, Billionaire Turns his Sights to Reviving the City's Heart," The Los Angeles Times, August 6, 2000.
[11] See also the questions raised in Joe Day's essay for the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design website, MEIERED, MoCA's recent exhibition What's Shakin: New Architecture in LA.
"US museums: growing pleasures - or pains"
The Artnewspaper.com
Ms Rich [Director of LACMA] doubts that the project would involve the demolition of every existing structure on the campus: "Some would like to do that. I think it's pretty unrealistic." She feels no responsibility to bring a major work of architecture to Los Angeles.1
Thursday, December 6, 2001
"L.A. Art Museum Decides to Radically Reshape Itself"
The Los Angeles Times
Choosing between a tear-down and a fixer-upper, leaders of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art took the leap Wednesday. They unanimously approved a proposal by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas to demolish most of the buildings at the Mid-Wilshire site and replace them with a vast structure that sits on columns and is topped by a tent-like roof.2
Dormant within the somewhat innocuous competition for the renovation and transformation of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) remains the more volatile potential that Colin Rowe , architectural critic and general provocateur, once proffered about contemporary urbanism:
Scratch the surface of modern architecture's matter of factness, simply for a moment doubt its ideals of objectivity, and almost invariably, subsumed beneath the veneers of rationalism, there is to be found that highly volcanic species of psychological lava, which, in the end, is the substratum of the modern city.3
Despite the aspirations of the 1997 disaster film Volcano, which depicts a flow of magma emerging from the La Brea Tar Pits, rather than lava bubbling up to the surface of the LACMA site is a sticky, tar-like liquid known as bitumen or "brea" that occupies subterranean zones out of which also emerges methane gas. Dave Perera of the LA Weekly recounts the import of this material:
High-pressure surges of methane, a flammable "natural gas" associated with oil fields, twice have shut down stretches of Third Street: once in 1985, after a gas explosion in a Ross Dress For Less store, and again in 1989, after a fountain of gas, water and mud burst through the ground in front of a nearby bank. Methane, says Fire Department Inspector Lloyd Fukuda, "blew out a whole plug of mud and continued to blow for quite a while."4
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art sits in this neighborhood, bordered by Wilshire Boulevard, Sixth Street, Fairfax Avenue, and Curson Avenue, within an area that the city has designated a "High Potential Methane Zone." Loosely applying Rowe's logic to the competition might be to question the psychology of LACMA's gelatinous substructure. Or, it might be to doubt the matter of factness of "modernity's ideals of objectivity" and to find "subsumed beneath the veneer of rationalism" a highly viscous psychology of irrationalism. At LACMA, however, the city's incendiary potential remains more above ground than below through a scenario in which the museum is anxious to demolish its existing buildings, leaving for an architect to accomplish what Los Angeles's natural forces have not.
But then again, Rem Koolhaas is a force of nature. Insofar as he broke the competition rules and recommended that the museum demolish its core building complex, the decision to award the first prize to OMA provokes a certain amount of controversy. Until the office completes the transformation of its winning diagram into an articulate design proposal, the full extent of this controversy remains undetermined. But while Los Angeles waits to learn the scope of Rem Koolhaas's revised scheme, the city's urban history, the site's architectural pedigree, and the alternative proposals submitted by Jean Nouvel, Steven Holl, Daniel Libeskind, and Thom Mayne of Morphosis, provide critical positions from which to assess the competition.
Los Angeles is simultaneously growing out, filling in, and disappearing. After approximately thirty years of vacancy in the heart of downtown, the dirt lots on Bunker Hill, rendered empty by reckless policies of urban renewal, finally are transforming into an architectural museum along Grand Avenue, now lined with significant new monuments designed by internationally acclaimed architects. Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall and Jos Rafael Moneo's Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels approach completion, closing the gaps near Welton Becket and Associates's 1964 Music Center and Arata Isozaki's 1986 Museum of Contemporary Art.5 Across town, in Brentwood, Richard Meier's 1997 Getty Center dominates the hill above the Sepulveda Pass as a play of Corbusian forms encrusted with Italian travertine. And somewhat closer to downtown, at Exposition Park, the board of trustees of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County announced in April of 2002 that David Chipperfield Architects, Foster and Partners, Herzog & de Meuron, Steven Holl Architects (once again), and Machado and Silvetti Associates are the finalists in an invited competition for the renovation of their 1913 Beaux Arts complex. About this latest news, The Los Angeles Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff writes:
The rest of the 410,000-square-foot complex will be demolished or significantly redesigned, including the 1960 Delacour Auditorium; a three-story, 46,000-square-foot addition built in the 1970s; and the entire south facade, which was part of a 1924-1930 addition that was never completed. "We want a more iconic architecture, something that will be a magnet to the Exposition Park area," said [Jane] Pisano."6
All of this building activity serves to climatize the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's announcement, made on 5 December 2001, that it had selected the architectural firm of OMA as the winning entry to expand and renovate its campus of buildings located along Wilshire Boulevard's Miracle Mile. As with other cities seeking to augment their cultural legitimacy and cosmopolitan identity through a building program of large public institutions, Los Angeles is attempting to perform in the theater of international high design and concomitantly tapping into the potential financial returns from this era of museum urbanism. Given that the famous intersection of Hollywood and Vine is a cruel joke to play on visitors to the city, Los Angeles is sorely in need of viable tourist attractions above and beyond Universal Studios and Venice Beach.
And while the donors, patrons, competition juries, and museum boards attempt to exercise the utmost prudence in their respective decision-making processes, one must wonder, particularly regarding the case of LACMA and LA's reputation of Hollywood celebrity, if the city leaders are basing their decisions on the quality of the architecture as much as they are on a putative and quite outmoded notion of star architects. This is to posit that Los Angeles's own cultural insecurity and willingness to perpetuate the myth that it lacks any significant urban history might form a blind spot to such glaring starlight. Where the 1960s demolition of a rich housing stock at Bunker Hill should serve as a cautionary tale to a city that purports to reinvent itself every five years, it serves rather as a paradigm.
Regarding the history of the more immediate site, the 17-mile-long stretch of street that forms Wilshire Boulevard, "one of Los Angeles's grandest thoroughfares", connects downtown Los Angeles with the Pacific Ocean. In 1921 A.W. Ross developed a section of the boulevard where the museum sits as the Miracle Mile. Significant to a city that grew up with the automobile, this "Fifth Avenue of the West" catered to vehicular transportation by providing entrances on the parking lot side of the buildings.7 Leonard and Dale Pitt write that "by the 1960s the Miracle Mile was fading, losing its trade to more modern suburban shopping malls, and many of the notable architectural creations, variations of the Art Deco style - began to disappear."8
It was in the middle of this decade of decline, in 1965, that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art first opened its doors to a set of buildings designed by the local architect William L. Pereira. As Ed Ruscha depicts it in his 1965-68 oil painting, The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, the original Pereira design consisted of three structures - the Ahmanson, the Bing, and the Hammer - forming a courtyard that floated above a water plaza. Somewhat portentously, Ruscha painted the Ahmanson building in flames and portrayed the rest of the complex as if it had been severed from the urban context of Los Angeles. This canonical image of the County Museum, a white temple of corporate modernism floating in an urbanism of grand setbacks and flowing fountains, persisted until 1986 when the firm of Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer added the Anderson Building to the center of the plaza. Shortly after the completion of this postmodern addition - replete with glazed terracotta moldings and glass block walls - arrived Bruce Goff's posthumously constructed and typically idiosyncratic Japanese Pavilion. Finally, the museum purchased as an annex the former May Company department store, designed in 1940 by Albert C. Martin and S.A. Marx as a Streamline Moderne set piece that marks the intersection of Wilshire and Fairfax with a cylinder clad in gold mosaic tile. Notwithstanding the Goff pavilion, the architecture of the LACMA campus might merit little recognition for the quality of its architecture, but it does merit attention for its place in the city's historical imagination. When OMA's winning entry is complete Ed Ruscha's painting will be the most significant artifact remaining of what many - especially Koolhaas and Ouroussoff - consider to be a collection of insignificant and mediocre buildings that nonetheless have attained over the years a patina of architectural respectability and an aura of public affection.9
OMA plans to maintain the Goff Pavilion, the May Company annex, and a museum parking structure while they propose razing the Ahmanson, the Bing, the Hammer and the Anderson buildings because "this configuration resists critical mass and inhibits the clarity of its collections."10 The office maintains that economic gain and curatorial clarity quite literally decided for them the direction their proposal would take. As OMA writes:
We discovered that a consolidated LACMA could perform more efficiently, expend less money on renovation, open up more of the park to the city and create a sense of coherence and the much-needed presence that this museum has lacked for decades. Any other approach would only exacerbate its problems. Our hands were tied.11
Were OMA's hands similarly tied when in 1997 they suggested demolishing a section of New York's MoMA?12 In defense of their proposal, the office presented a taxonomy of three alternative formal strategies for additions that they handily dismissed as ultimately impracticable. These three alternative approaches to the competition are (1) "stealth projects" which attempt to "disguise the presence of yet another pavilion," (2) "dispersed projects" that rely upon spreading "program throughout the site to better utilize the park," and (3) "mega-buildings" which cloak "the existing order to create a unified whole."13
And while it might be argued, at a diagrammatic level at least, that the other entrants indeed adopted one or more of these various typologies, in so doing they also demonstrated the inherent viability of such strategies to function as convincing alternate proposals rather than exacerbated problems. The office of Jean Nouvel Architects - which emerged as a close second to OMA - presented a megastructure that cloaks the existing buildings within the tectonic language of the additions. Nouvel proffers a new, seamless face for LACMA and consigns any more radical architectural moves to dramatic shapes that furtively appear at the roofline of his proposal. Daniel Libeskind designed an independent pavilion, but one that does not attempt to disguise its newness and instead complements the stylistic diversity and historical layers of the LACMA campus. Potentially exemplifying the "dispersed" typology, the Morphosis proposal insinuates itself into and around the existing buildings as a unifying form that functions both as stealth disguise and as a megastructure entwining the disparate pavilions with a connective tissue of woven bands. And finally, Steven Holl's project, similar to OMA's diagram of a hovering box, unifies the site under the canopy of a single edifice but does so by maintaining the existing buildings and proposing to demolish - as sanctioned by the competition guidelines - only the Ahmanson galleries.
Koolhaas presented a series of illustrative diagrams to the jury - emblematic of a kind of pseudo-research that recently has fascinated architecture schools throughout the United States - that served as the rationale driving OMA's design proposal to demolish the "uninspired" existing museum buildings down to the basement level. OMA quite literally reified the organizational charts entitled Collection Timeline, Quantities + Media, Hard Costs bar charts, and other similar analyses into a full blown but perhaps equally "uninspired" design proposal. The remaining basement level of existing offices will serve as the Pompeiian Base for the existing street-level plaza now named the Miesian Court. A 55' X 90' column grid supports a second level Encyclopedic Plateau and a reticulated tensile canopy, constructed out of a Mylar membrane, that will cover this architectural stratigraphy. The exhibition spaces literally sit on a pedestal above the city while the main entrance to the complex addresses the existing parking structure.
Koolhaas argues somewhat paradoxically that "LACMA's current proliferation across the site is a microcosm of Los Angeles: distributed rather than focused, it inhibits the full unfolding of its potential both as a museum and as a site."14 The paradox exists in Koolhaas's willingness to develop LA's sprawl into a metaphor for LACMA's campus and an argument that demolishing this collection of buildings is the most effective means to densify the site. Moreover, as the competition boards indicate, OMA is not really interested in the city, with the firm presenting only one small context model as any indication that the proposal sits on an urban site in LA. Rather than the city, Koolhaas is preoccupied with transforming cost estimation and exhibition taxonomy into a new form of architecture. Koolhaas locates the entire museum collection on the Encyclopedic Plateau, with four parallel bands of exhibition space, separated by "utilitarian trenches," providing display area for the five museum centers of Asian, American, European, Latin American, and Modern and Contemporary art. The bands function as linear expressions of the collection's chronology and will be designed in ways that reflect the style of the art exhibited to the extent that LACMA becomes "a museum of exhibition typologies and techniques."15
The strategy of this organization allows the visitor to either move through the collection in a strict historical sequence or to shuttle back and forth across the bands, thereby creating an arena for attaining fugitive and improvisational knowledge. Koolhaas offers the LACMA curators a generic, universal space to display their art and an argument that demolition is more cost effective than addition and renovation. He also offers a different kind of history lesson about the site, one in which the proposed Miesian Court recalls the fact that "Pereira's scheme was commissioned as a compromise among the trustees, over the objections of then-director Richard Fargo Brown, who had championed a plan by Mies van der Rohe."16
In contradistinction to OMA's submission, Jean Nouvel's competition entry subscribes to the prescriptions of orthodox urban design in which a definitive building edge holds the line along Wilshire Boulevard, off of which open a main entrance and a large public plaza. Nouvel also creates a second public space on the roof, now transformed into a garden of sculptural pavilions. He maintains each of the existing museum buildings, including the Ahmanson, but effectively opens up the interior atrium of its galleries into an exterior courtyard. That Nouvel offers normative, almost formulaic solutions to the site potential suggests a positive critique of his having developed a project in response to Los Angeles's particularly fragile urban fabric.
And, in fact, the proposal's skyline suggests a rather radical set of formal moves. At first glance, the model representing Nouvel's design suggests that the architect casually displaced sundry objects from his desk drawer - a cigarette lighter, a tape dispenser, a box painted in Yves Klein blue, an ash tray, etc. - on to the roof plaza. At second look, however, the seemingly casual array of sculptural objects betrays the absolute calculation of Nouvel's proposal, one in which the elevated garden plaza positions the museum against the cultural and physical geography of the city, replete with views of the Hollywood Hills and the downtown silhouette. The sculptural objects resting upon the sky plaza mark vertical circulation, enclose gallery spaces, or provide public amenities, while they also mimic the more immediate contexts of the May Company annex, echo the fanfare of signage along Wilshire Boulevard, or gesture to the grid shifts present in this portion of LA. Nouvel explains that he is creating a "neighborhood of museums" with "theoretical shapes" balancing upon the roof.17 Like Koolhaas, Nouvel writes a metaphor of excavation into his LACMA proposal, one that positions the museum as reflecting the "petrification of a civilization" and an urbanity of "sedimentation." Unlike Koolhaas, Nouvel plays by the competition rules, and in so doing posits a convincing archaeology of a city with layers accumulating one upon the other over time.
The office of Steven Holl Architects provides perhaps the most literal allusion to the LACMA context with a sculpted roof simulating the texture, color and animate form of the adjacent tar pits. Although this level is inaccessible to the public and must be witnessed from the elevated position of nearby towers, Holl mirrors the roof plane in a water garden he proposes at the rear of the museum - articulating and molding the existing backyard of archaeological pavilions into a plastic expression of the liquid substrate. The asphalt pour - to borrow a project title from Robert Smithson's project outside of Rome - that comprises Holl's roof functions as more than a formal device, it also operates as a thick interstitial zone allowing natural light to penetrate the interior. As Holl explains, the "gallery spaces are top-lit by light modulators whose twists transform direct sunlight into a soft diffused light. They form a geometric landscape on the roof." In comparison with Holl's attentiveness to the quality of light his museum provides and the significant architecture it takes to accomplish this task, OMA's tensile and transparent roof instills less technological confidence in its ability to illuminate while simultaneously protect the valuable artworks it covers. In response to this question, OMA proposes that the Mylar roof will be comprised of air-filled panels with flaps that will modulate the quality and quantity of light entering the exhibition spaces.
Holl intends for his museum addition to engage the city as a "social condenser for greater LA," one that contains a large public walkway or canyon that connects Wilshire with 6th Street and is "intended to be free and open 24 hours daily" as it "beckons the public from multiple directions and links." Holl's pedestrian canyon provides more than a tangible contribution to the production of public place in Los Angeles; it also provides a poetic space from which to observe the bituminous roof canopy as if from a submerged realm of shadows and subterranean desires.
The only Los Angeles office to have submitted an entry to the LACMA competition necessarily derived its design from the specificity of the urban fabric, building a site model that spans the entire Miracle Mile. Morphosis proposes the formal maneuver of an urban weave or cross-stitch that maintains the existing buildings by linking them together with long, curvilinear bands of new architecture.18 As Mayne explains, "The museum spills into the city while the city channels into the museum." Mayne follows the lead suggested by the competition brief and proposes demolishing the Ahmanson galleries and the existing parking structure along Ogden Drive while preserving the balance of the existing structures. Mayne "strove to adjudicate between the notion of the museum as a neutral, anonymous 'sacred' space where architecture is all but invisible and that of the museum as a theme park or shopping mall with what is often perceived as a sensory overload." In so doing he attempts to dissolve "the physical boundaries of the institution."
The interwoven bands, or connective tissue, of linear space reach out from the interior of the site and gesture to the urban fabric of the greater Los Angeles area. A lobby bridge protrudes out over the sidewalk and hovers above Wilshire as a cantilevered gateway that derives its form and orientation from Ogden Drive. Morphosis reiterates the angle this street makes on the south side of Wilshire in the bar that extends across the site to Sixth Street. Morphosis's proposal explicitly sites and re-sites the museum within the context of a city that, according to Mayne, is "marked by contradiction, conflict, change, and dynamism." This project not only addresses and redefines the urban form of Los Angeles, it also acknowledges the role of the county art museum as an institution that should belong to everyone in the city. By eroding the institution's physical boundaries the architect reinforces the public's accessibility.
As precedented by his design for the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Daniel Libeskind does not disappoint any expectation that his LACMA proposal will derive from the formal manipulation of an abstract shape. For LACMA he explores a triangular scribble based upon a compositional analysis of Leonardo da Vinci's 1508 oil painting, Virgin of the Rocks, that just so happens to hang, not in Los Angeles's County Museum, but instead, in London's National Gallery. Libeskind transforms the compositional organization of Leonardo's painting into a formal strategy for his museum addition: the semi-circular shape created in the space described by the Virgin, the angel, the infant Saint John, and the infant Christ allows him to orchestrate a series of architectural moves that both define and violate the perfection of a new circular plaza. This plaza, or Teatro del Mund" as Libeskind calls it, slopes in section from three stories down to the ground plane across the diameter of the circle. To Libeskind, the Teatro del Mundo acts as a "giant pulsating heart" for the city. According to the model, Libeskind's new building consists of a series of interlocking geometries through which he slices a large glass atrium. According to the plan, he demolishes the Ahmanson and replaces it with two new buildings. He connects the new structure to the remaining LACMA buildings to the east with a circulation corridor he refers to as the art walk, a path that also penetrates the former May Company building with a violent angular cut. Libeskind provides the museum with a different version of the weaving analogy developed in the Morphosis project by stating that he is "connecting tissue" and "literally stitching the campus together."
Competition Brief
A full apprehension of the decision regarding the prizewinner of the LACMA competition requires a little background information about the museum's aspirations and certain substantive curatorial shifts. At one level the existing LACMA complex is an architectural success, blending the urban necessity of public space - almost nonexistent in LA - with the populist requirements of public education into a campus of buildings that are open and symbolically accessible to LA's highly diverse public. At another level the museum is a failure, a barely competitive collective in a world class art market displayed in dark, warren-like galleries. In response to these concerns, the museum's current director, Andrea Rich, initiated a program to expand LACMA's reputation and influence by radically restructuring its curatorial departments into centers for American, Asian, European, Latin American, and Modern and Contemporary art. Soon after this effort was complete she solicited Lord and Associates to analyze the museum's needs and then asked Richard Koshalek, president and CEO of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, to organize the competition.19 Each of the five architects selected to submit entries received $200,000 to complete a proposal for a $200 million design.
Richard Koshalek, Neil M. Denari (former director of SCI-Arc), Sylvia Lavin (chairwoman of UCLA's Department of Architecture), and Andrea Rich's cabinet of staff advisors evaluated the designs and reported to the competition committee. Initially a tie formed between Koolhaas and Nouvel but after the two architects were asked to return to L.A., OMA, as we know, prevailed in securing the commission. Apparently the museum board and competition committee were swayed by the mathematics of Davis Langdon Adamson, the cost estimator for both projects, who reported that OMA's proposal would cost about $43 million less than Nouvel's. But more important than the cost differential, a somewhat narrow method for evaluating design excellence, it was the new LACMA organization, made visually manifest in Koolhaas's proposal, that influenced the decision to the extent that the director begins to take credit for OMA's solution:
"If we hadn't done a really intensive reshaping of the internal organization around our collections and the physical planning around that," she says, "Koolhaas couldn't have come up with that design." And LACMA wouldn't have agreed to it.20
While critics might express a general dismay at the predictability of the entrants' offering design proposals that represent their own signature style, such criticism lacks substance given that these architects were selected to compete precisely because of their signature styles. That the winner shocked anyone with its supposed radicality is what puzzles us here. Where each of the five projects has merit and would serve the museum's needs, what seems to be the decisive difference between the winning entry and the four other competitors is the former's focus on meeting the economic and curatorial demands of the museum and the latter's interest in solving these problems while simultaneously creating a museum that addresses the unspoken pressures of the city. Unlike its private counterpart the Getty Center, sectioned off from the city in the hills above Brentwood, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is a highly public and entirely urban institution. Ultimately, when faced with the opportunity to select Nouvel's sky-terrace, Libeskind's art plaza, Holl's public canyon, or Mayne's gateway, the museum board and its advisors preferred instead to award the prize to the blood simple display of their "encyclopedic" collection in an anonymous wrapper and to approve the demolition of a group of existing buildings they apparently have come to despise. That museum curators engage in a highly ambivalent relationship with architecture should come as no surprise, such are the desires of professionals whose primary goal is to emphasize what is on the walls rather than the walls themselves. That the museum board seems to have been waiting for permission to demolish a group of dysfunctional galleries and support spaces, too, does not surprise. What does surprise is Koolhaas's having convinced them that a rather straightforward Miesian approach to museum design is somehow daring, bold, and even avant-garde. And the museum's willingness to forfeit its own architectural endowment for the utopia of a tabula rasa and the delirium of universal space certainly disappoints. If the museum curators, at this point in the game at least, clearly have indicated in their selection of a competition winner that they are not really interested in making urban space, they also have made the case that they are not really interested in making architecture.
1 David D’Arcy "US museums: growing pleasures–or pains," The Artnewspaper.com (October 1, 2001); http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=7533.
Thanks to Vik Liptak, Assistant Chair of Woodbury University, for reading and correcting this essay.
2 Suzanne Muchnic "L.A. Art Museum Decides to Radically Reshape Itself" The Los Angeles Times (December 6, 2001)
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3 Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter Collage City (Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1975) p. 11.
4 Dave Perera "Fresh Produce and Streets of Fire Making sense of the methane explosion in Fairfax " LA Weekly (May 4 - 10, 2001); .
5 On the architecture along grand avenue see Joe Day’s review of "What's Shakin': New Architecture in LA" title "MEIERED: MoCA's recent exhibition "What's Shakin': New Architecture in LA," on the LA Forum’s website: .
6Nicolai Ouroussoff "Museum Considers 5 Design Firms
Leaders of the natural history institution in Exposition Park plan a renovation of up to $300 million" The Los Angeles Times (April 2, 2002)
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7 Leonard Pitt and Dale Pitt Los Angeles A to Z: An Encyclopedia of the City and County (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997) p. 328.
8Pitt and Pitt, 551. Qalsosee suissmann
9 Ouroussoff writes: "The failure of some of the world's most notable architectural talents to come up with a compelling scheme that would save the old campus only makes Koolhaas' point stronger: The old LACMA is not worth saving. LACMA can now move on, comfortable with its choice." In "Conceptual, but Already More" the Los Angeles Times (December 7, 2001)
10 From an unpublished handout OMA submitted to the museum board, unpaginated.
11 Architect’s handout.
12 Ouroussoff writes: "Koolhaas is known for his radical, conceptual designs. In a 1997 scheme for New York's Museum of Modern Art, he proposed demolishing MOMA's ground floor. Its famous sculpture garden was sunk below ground level, and a sleek new tower–MOMA Inc.–was implanted on top of Philip Johnson's 1964 addition to the 53rd Street building. The design, which was intended as a critique of art and commerce, was rejected outright." In"Conceptual, but Already More."
13Architect’s handout.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Suzanne Muchnic and Lynn Smith "LACMA Raze Met With Praise"The Los Angeles Times (December 10, 2001);
17Quotation taken from panels on display at LACMA’s exhibition of the five competition entries and written by museum curator Carol S. Eliel. Unless otherwise noted, all other quotations are taken from these panels.
18 David D’Arcy reported that Los Angeles based architect, Frank Gehry, was "not in the running for the job. The museum organized a competition scheduled for the week of the New York bombings (now postponed), and Gehry refused to compete against other architects. "We would have liked him to participate," said Eli Broad, the collector and LACMA trustee (see p.35). In The Art Newspaper.com "US museums: growing pleasures–or pains American museums in the process of expanding explain why and how they expect the recession to affect their projects."
19 Muchnic, "L.A. Art Museum Decides to Radically Reshape Itself."
20 Muchnic "Under the Big Top: How the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and director Andrea Rich arrived at their surprising plan for a striking new design" The Los Angeles Times (March 3, 2002); http://www.calendarlive.com/top/1,1419,L-LATimes-Art-X!ArticleDetail-52478,00.html.