OLD NEWS

THE NEW LACMA IS SLEEK, SPLOTCHY, POWERFUL, JARRING, MONOTONOUS, APPEALING AND ABSURD by Christopher Knight
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Swiss architect Peter Zumthor and LACMA Director Michael Govan say the new David Geffen Galleries building is a ‘concrete sculpture’ unto itself, a cringey claim.
A sneak peek of the building’s corridors and 90 bunker-like galleries reprises concerns about the plan to hang ever-rotating art by drilling holes in all that concrete.
The preview event Thursday comes amid senior staff departures, including the COO, CFO and deputy director for curatorial and exhibitions.
Ever since Brutalist architecture emerged in the 1950s, the style has been polarizing. Concrete might be gray, but public response rarely enters into gray areas. The buildings’ raw, unfinished concrete forms, typically simple, are loved or hated.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is nearing completion of its own new Brutalist building, designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, 82, to house the permanent collection of paintings, sculptures and other works of art. For three days and one evening, beginning July 3, museum members will get a sneak peek at the empty interior spaces of the David Geffen Galleries. The fully finished project, with art installed, doesn’t open until April 2026.
Concrete is not eco-friendly, either in production or in results like heat magnification, and some celebrated architects with a social justice bent refuse to use it. But its visual power is undeniable — a strength of the huge Zumthor design. His poured-in-place concrete gobbles 347,500 square feet, including 110,000 square feet in 90 exhibition galleries and corridors lofted 30 feet above ground atop seven massive piers, crossing Wilshire Boulevard.
Some of my favorite art museum buildings are Brutalist in design, like Marcel Breuer’s fortress-like former Whitney in New York (1966), and Louis Kahn’s refined classicism at the Kimbell in Fort Worth (1972). Brad Cloepfil’s Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, which may be the best new American museum built for art in the last 15 years, uses concrete brilliantly to illuminate Still’s rugged painting motifs. Zumthor’s Geffen doesn’t come close.
I’ve written a lot about the long-aborning LACMA project over the last dozen years, focused on the design’s negative impact on the museum program, but that’s now baked in. (The museum pegs the building cost at $720 million, but sources have told me the entire project cost is closer to $835 million.) L.A.’s encyclopedic museum, with a global permanent collection simply installed geographically as straightforward chronology, is dead, and the Geffen Galleries prevent it from ever coming back. Changing theme shows drawn from the collection, curatorially driven, are the new agenda.
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Having theme galleries is like banishing the alphabet that organizes the encyclopedia on your shelf. Chronology and geography are not some imperialistic scheme dominating global art. They just make finding things in a sprawling encyclopedic art collection easy for visitors. Good luck with that now.
I’ve pretty much avoided consideration of the building’s aesthetics. The exception was a 2013 column responding to “The Presence of the Past,” a somewhat clumsy exhibition of Zumthor’s still-evolving design conception, which has changed greatly in the final form. Reviewing purpose-built architecture is a fool’s errand when you can’t experience the purpose — impossible for another 10 months, when the art-installed Geffen opens.
A press event Thursday allowed entry into the gallery spaces, however, so a few things are now obvious. One is that museum galleries are theatrical spaces — there’s a reason they’re called shows — and chances are you’ve never seen so much concrete in one place. Sometimes it’s sleek and appealing, sometimes splotchy and cracked. (Surface mottling could soften over time.) But across floors, walls and ceilings of 90 bunker-like rooms and long, meandering corridors, the limitless concrete is monotonous. Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” meets Beckett’s theater of the absurd.
Another is that views from the floor-to-ceiling windows that surround the building will offer lovely, interesting city vistas — welcome relief from the monotony. (Curtains will be installed around the perimeter.) A third is that the light, some entering horizontally from the side windows and a couple thin clerestory slots, but much of it from fixed vertical ceiling cans, is going to be a problem.
Those windows are also one of the biggest design losses in the value-engineering, undertaken to control ballooning costs. (Adjusted for inflation, the original Whitney Museum’s construction cost per square foot was about $633, Kimbell’s was about $469, and LACMA clocks in at $1,400, according to its website. Brutalist, indeed.) The floor plate was originally planned to follow the organic curves of the ceiling plate, with continuous, hugely expensive curved-glass windows linking the two. Now the floor plan is largely rectilinear.
The glass panels had to be flat, so the composition is a bit more dynamic. But the roofline overlaps can be jarring. At one end the hovering curved roof looks like a pizza too big for the box below.
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Also daunting: Art will be hung on all that concrete by drilling holes in the walls and pounding in anchors. Moving the art will be cumbersome, requiring concrete patching. The entire process is labor-intensive and expensive.
Zumthor is the sixth architect to have had a whack at LACMA, following earlier efforts by William L. Pereira, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, Bruce Goff, Rem Koolhaas, and Renzo Piano. Koolhaas never got beyond the proposal stage, although his marvelous idea pioneered the teardown-then-build-a-pavilion-on-stilts plan now coming to very different fruition. Only Goff produced a notable building, with a novel Japanese Pavilion that conceptually turned inside out the spiral Guggenheim Museum by his mentor, Frank Lloyd Wright. (Happily, the Japanese Pavilion can now be seen from the street.) The rest were mostly meh, salted with an occasional ugh.
Zumthor and LACMA Director Michael Govan pronounce the new Geffen building to be “a concrete sculpture,” which is why it’s being shown empty now. The cringey claim is grandiose, and it makes one wonder why being architecture is not enough. If it’s true, it’s the only monumental sculpture I know that has a couple of restaurants, an auditorium and a store. Apparently, an artistic hierarchy exists, with sculpture ranked above architecture.
That’s odd, because we’ve also been repeatedly told that LACMA built the place to undermine such conceits. Museum officials are still banging away on the absurd claim that a single-story building for art, banishing distinctions between “upstairs/downstairs,” confers an egalitarian marker on what global cultures produce. Hierarchy, however, is not a matter of physicality or direction, but of conceptual status. Rosa Parks was riding on a single-level bus, not a double-decker, and she knew exactly what her mighty refusal to sit in the back meant.
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LACMA should be half as savvy. Climb the 60-plus steps up to the Geffen Galleries, or take an elevator, and when you arrive some art will be out front and some out back. Surely, we won’t regard that front/back difference as anti-egalitarian.
Will the Geffen Galleries be successful? My crystal ball is broken, but I see no reason why it won’t be a popular attraction. And that is clearly the museum’s priority.
An urban environment with a talented architect’s unusual art museum design tagged by a monumental topiary sculpture on the main drag — that’s a description of Frank Gehry’s incomparable Guggenheim Bilbao, the great 1997 museum in Basque northern Spain, where Jeff Koons’ marvelous floral “Puppy” sculpture holds court out front. (Every palace needs topiary, a leafy green power emblem of culture’s control over nature; Koons’ 40-foot-tall West Highland white dog makes for an especially cuddly symbol of guardianship.) Now the description fits LACMA too.
The museum just announced the acquisition of Koons’ floral behemoth, “Split-Rocker,” <https://tinyurl.com/22gltewt> a rather bland hobby horse topiary that merges a toy dinosaur’s head with the hobby horse’s head. LACMA is next door to the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum, and the kiddie dino, a natural history plaything, forces a shotgun wedding with a degraded example of art history’s triumphant motif of a man on a horse. Govan worked on Bilbao before coming to L.A., and the formula there is being repeated here. L.A.’s eye-grabbing building won’t be as great nor its Insta-ready topiary be nearly as good as the Bilbao ensemble, but when does lightning strike twice?
As museums, Bilbao and LACMA couldn’t be more different. One has a small, mostly mediocre permanent collection of contemporary art, while the other has a large, often excellent permanent collection of global art from all eras. The so-called Bilbao Effect sent cultural tourism, then already on the rise, skyrocketing. With the David Geffen Galleries, LACMA has put its very expensive eggs in that tourism basket.
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It might take some time to work. The U.S. is the world’s largest travel and tourism sector, but it’s the only one forecast by the World Travel & Tourism Council to see international visitor decline in 2025 — and probably beyond. Between erratic pandemic recovery and an abusive federal government hostile to foreigners, worries are growing in L.A. about the imminent soccer World Cup and the Olympics.
It’s also surprising that the museum is now bleeding critical senior staff, just as LACMA’s lengthy transformation from a civic art museum into a tourist destination trembles on the verge of completion. Previously unreported, chief operating officer Diana Vesga is already gone, deputy director for curatorial and exhibitions J. Fiona Ragheb recently left, and chief financial officer Mark Mitchell departs next week.
Those are three top-tier institutional positions. Let’s hope they don’t know something we also don’t know. _LATimes

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LACMA OPENS ITS NEW BUILDING FOR A SNEAK PEEK: PHOTOS FROM THE FIRST PREVIEW
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A sprawling, immersive concert by composer and SoCal jazz hero Kamasi Washington called for multiple bands, each with about a dozen musicians, to play site-specific arrangements throughout the empty galleries before art has been installed.
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Preview events give museum members a chance to view Zumthor’s design before art is installed. One of the lingering questions is how the concrete walls will fare given the museum’s new plan to shift from permanent collection displays to ever-rotating exhibitions — and all the rehanging of artworks that will be required.
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<https://tinyurl.com/2b56vbuh> _LATimes

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HOW KAMASI WASHINGTON AND 100 MUSICIANS FILLED LACMA’S EMPTY NEW BUILDING WITH A SONIC WORK OF ART
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Washington turned out to be the ideal radical expansionist for the new LACMA, with a resplendent enlargement of his 2018 half-hour EP, “Harmony of Difference.” The short tracks — “Desire,” “Knowledge,” “Perspective,” “Humility,” “Integrity” and “Truth” — employ nearly three dozen musicians in bursts of effusive wonder.
For LACMA, Washington tripled the number of musicians and the length. What some critics thought were bursts of bluster, however enthralling, became outright splendor. Introducing the program, I got little sense of what this building will be like as a museum with art on the walls, but it’s a great space for thinking big musically and, in the process, for finding hope in an L.A. this year beset by fires and fear-inducing troops on our streets.
Washington is one of our rare musicians who thrives on excess. He has long been encouraged to aim toward concision, especially in his longer numbers, in which his untiring improvisations can become exhausting in their many climaxes. But that misses the point. I’ve never heard him play anything, short or long, that couldn’t have been three times longer. His vision is vast, and he needs space.
In the David Geffen Galleries, he got it. The nine ensembles included a large mixed band that he headed, along with ensembles of strings, brass, woodwinds and choruses. Each played unique arrangements of the songs, not quite synchronized, but if you ambled the long walkways, you heard the material in different contexts as though this were sonic surrealism.
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Acoustically, the Geffen is a weird combination. The large glass windows and angled concrete walls reflect sound in very different ways. Dozens of spaces vary in shape, size and acoustical properties. During a media tour earlier in the day, I found less echo than might be expected, though each space had its own peculiarities.
There was also the visual element. The concert took place at sunset, the light through the large windows ever changing, the “Harmony of Difference” becoming the differences of the bubbling tar pits nearby or the street life on Wilshire or LACMA’s Pavilion for Japanese Art, which looks lovely from the new galleries.
Govan’s vision is of a place where art of all kinds from all over comes together, turning the galleries into a promenade of discovery.
Musically, this falls more in line with John Cage’s “Musicircus,” in which any number of musical ensembles perform at chance-derived times as a carnival of musical difference — something for which the Geffen Galleries is all but tailor-made. Nevertheless, Washington brilliantly demonstrated the new building’s potential for dance, opera, even theater.
Seven decades on, Zumthor, whether he intended it or not, now challenges LACMA to become LACMAP: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Performance.
<https://tinyurl.com/2d6oqrjs> _Mark Swed _LATimes

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
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LACMA OPENS THE DOORS TO ITS NEW BUILDING
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Ever since the Los Angeles County Museum of Art engaged the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor 16 years ago, its $720 million new building has had a long journey from controversy to construction to curatorial challenge.
On Thursday evening, the curvilinear behemoth finally became a place where people could come inside.
Although the art will not be installed until next year, the museum opened its doors for its first public glimpse of the new David Geffen Galleries, featuring a commissioned performance by the saxophonist and composer Kamasi Washington — with 120 musicians disbursed throughout the building.
Visitors walking past the soaring windows, as the sounds of instruments and voices filled the undulating concrete passageway, were visibly excited — and even moved — by what many described as a welcome injection of positive energy to a city battered by protests and recovering from fires.
“It’s really a special thing for us to be here to experience it almost raw,” said Frank Svengsouk, an art director and senior manager for the Disney Entertainment Division, who had come from Carlsbad, about two hours south, after having been displaced by the fires in Altadena. “It makes us think about how much we love the city and how much the city means to us, how much the city brings back to us.
“Think about Paris with I.M. Pei — it’s changing the landscape of this place,” he added, referring to the impact of the skylit Louvre Pyramid as he gazed at the vista with his wife. “Over time, it’s going to be something important for us in L.A.”
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People who had bought some 2,000 tickets for Thursday evening — which was sold out — said they came out of curiosity, out of loyalty and out of a desire to experience firsthand a project they had heard about and witnessed from afar.
“We’ve driven up and down Wilshire for the last couple of years watching this thing take shape,” said Rick Wolfen, who works in commercial real estate and had come with his wife, Karen, an attorney. “So it’s cool to be on the inside looking out. I’m trying to think about the exhibitions that could fill these walls.”
Architecture critics will inevitably weigh in, as will art critics, once some 3,000 works from the museum’s encyclopedic collection — totaling more than 150,000 objects — are installed. Does the rough concrete make it seem cold? Is the design a meandering path that fosters artistic discovery, or a maze that makes it hard to find the bathroom? Can paintings work without white walls as backdrops, and will the strong architecture upstage quieter works of art? Do the outdoor plazas feel like shaded respites or the gloomy underside of a highway overpass?
The project has been dogged by controversy, with some viewing it as overly costly, others frustrated by its construction delays — partly due to the pandemic — and the Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight asserting that the museum has reduced its overall gallery area. LACMA’s director, Michael Govan, has answered that the space for art is, in fact, comparable to the 110,000 square feet of the four aging buildings that were replaced for the new addition.
But at Thursday’s kickoff of previews, which continue through July 7, the fog of debate fell away, and people seemed swept up in a spirit of celebration.
“It’s an amazing achievement,” said the art dealer Jeffrey Deitch, a former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. “I love the indoor-outdoor feel. The traditional museum is all closed off from the outside. It’s much fresher to bring light in, to see the city. I think the art is going to be stronger for it.”
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The museum has yet to specify which art will be placed where, but as Govan walked a reporter through the space before the public opening, he referred to some of the pieces he looked forward to seeing there, including works by the visual artists Lauren Halsey and Cathy Opie of Los Angeles, and Pedro Reyes, of Mexico City.
Govan said the museum had decided to open the building first to give the architecture its own moment in the sun, to give members a taste of what they’ve been waiting for and to “bless” its completion.
“The building has been an issue. I wanted to take that out of play, so when it opens everyone can focus on the art,” Govan said. “Get it out of your system — you love it, you hate it.”
Some of those in Thursday’s crowd said they were reserving judgment until the art was installed and that the rough-hewed concrete interior was likely to be something of a provocation. “Having concrete as the backdrop for the art is a great challenge curatorially,” said Emilia Yin, the founder of the Make Room gallery in Los Angeles. “But when it’s done right, it can be super exciting.”
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An early critique by Christopher Hawthorne in the Punch List Architecture Newsletter last week called out cracks in the museum’s floors — flecked with tiny shells — and the fixed quality of the cul-de-sac-like gallery spaces. But Govan said these elements were deliberate, that they wanted the building to feel as if it had always been there and that the galleries reflect elements of experience, rather than one narrative. “It’s not linear,” he said.
Many people moving through the building on Thursday evening seemed to agree that the addition was a significant new contribution to the city’s public architecture, likening it to Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall or Diller, Scofidio and Renfro’s Broad museum — which itself is now expanding.
They marveled at the sweep of the space and at the expansive views facing multiple directions — the Hollywood Hills, Wilshire Boulevard, Chris Burden’s “Urban Light” public art and the percolating tar pits — as if these vistas were artworks themselves.
“I really love the windows that are showing Los Angeles,” said Alex Hajdu, a production designer. “It’s celebrating the landscape outside. It brings the city inside the museum.”
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The evening began with a live DJ set in LACMA’s courtyard and featured local food trucks. A cocktail reception for invited guests in what will eventually be one of the museum’s three restaurants included the artists Lauren Halsey and Tacita Dean, as well as collectors like Joy Simmons and Janine and Lyndon J. Barrois Sr.
Museum directors flew in for the occasion, including Franklin Sirmans of the Pérez Art Museum Miami and — from New York — Glenn Lowry of the Museum of Modern Art, Anne Pasternak of the Brooklyn Museum and Thelma Golden of the Studio Museum in Harlem, who serves on LACMA’s board.
Local museum executives included Joanne Heyler, of the Broad, and Sandra Jackson-Dumont, the former director of the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, nearing completion in Exposition Park.
But the evening was not about boldfaced names. It was for visitors like Ryan and Nancy Aubry, who brought their two young children — their son Beau said he liked that “the floor is shiny” — and Jon Hall, who brought his service dog, Miss Lillian.
“She’s very good in crowds like this,” Hall said proudly. “We take her everywhere.”
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David Allen, an architectural engineer who is spearheading a jazz history museum in Oakland, said the Zumthor building brought to mind “harmony and melody.”
Climbing the museum’s seemingly floating outdoor staircases, the city’s residents seemed grateful for a glimpse of the building their taxpayer dollars had helped pay for. “This is the future,” said Francisco George, who sells vintage clothes and has worked as a docent at LACMA. “I think that this is going to set the standard for museums to follow.”
Petra Larsen, a costume designer, said she hoped that the project would serve as a community hub, adding that it symbolized the city’s resilience, optimism and innovation. “L.A. is a city that reinvents itself,” Larsen said. “It always has, and I think it always will. This building represents that.” _Robin Pogrebin_NYTimes