Forecasts were dire about what’s officially called the David Geffen Galleries, after the donor who gave $150 million.
“The blob that ate Wilshire Boulevard,” announced Architectural Record in 2014. “Suicide by architecture,” lamented The L.A. Review of Books five years later.
The building opens to museum members in the coming weeks and to the general public on May 4. I expect it will be wildly popular.
By turns uplifting, lyrical and pugnacious, the new Geffen Galleries bid to alter the cultural and civic weather of Los Angeles and reassert the city’s role as an American petri dish for experimental design and derring-do.
The architect is Peter Zumthor, a Swiss winner of the Pritzker Prize who, until now, was known for mostly modest-sized gems, including a spa in the Alps and a tepee-shaped concrete field chapel for a family of farmers outside Cologne, Germany.
When Michael Govan, LACMA’s director, tapped Zumthor for the job, he had never designed in America, much less anything this big. That was nearly 20 years ago.
The project turned out to be the Battle of the Somme. Critics were brutal. Raising money in L.A. was a slog. Govan and Zumthor wrestled over details. But they shared a big vision. I happened to be a fly on the wall when Zumthor made an initial pitch to LACMA trustees, introducing the idea of a museum lofted into the ether by floating the concept of tree houses and footbridges to replace the existing campus.
He sketched the tree houses on a large sheet of drawing paper, stared down at the page, then ripped the page from its pad, tossing it on the floor, as if restlessly searching in real time with his pencil for a better solution. Several trustees had been staring at their phones. They started leaning forward in their chairs.
Govan enlisted Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to partner with Zumthor and help him navigate American building codes and all the structural engineering, seismic requirements and environmental issues.
Efforts were made to mitigate the carbon footprint. The museum’s tens of thousands of cubic yards of concrete were intended to look immovable and eternal like the Pyramids. But the building would also have to be able to slide five feet in any direction atop seismic isolators in the event of an earthquake.
What results is a feat of concrete engineering to go along with the goals that Govan had for displaying LACMA’s collection. It needed to be reimagined and reshuffled, Govan argued, with ancient Greek sculptures, Indonesian batiks, old master paintings and midcentury automobiles presented on equal footing and in fresh combinations across a single stage.
The approach was something that many art museums have attempted for years, in one version or another; but this was to be an overhaul of an entire institution.
Architecturally, it would require the opposite of the usual orthogonal, white-box galleries. Zumthor devised a labyrinthine arrangement of liminal spaces — like a village with squares, lanes and back alleys — that encourages serendipity and in which it’s easy and useful to get lost.
The shape of the building ended up an amorphous multilegged beast, with up to 80-foot cantilevers. To a passing driver on Wilshire, it can appear to have emerged from the La Brea Tar Pits next door.
Its sleek, slithering single floor of galleries is lofted 30 feet into the air on seven humongous piers and sandwiched between two slabs of board-formed concrete supported by post-tension cables. Zumthor decided he wouldn’t try to make the concrete look immaculate, and it doesn’t.
It is streaked, pocked and stained. In Europe, his Swiss crews can make concrete resemble silk. He worked with American crews on LACMA, with different skills and “designed to their craft,” is how Eric Long, a structural engineer at SOM, put it to me. It was a pragmatic, old-school Romantic approach, touting virtue in rough edges.
I spoke with a few of the workers, who said they had never been asked to do anything so difficult or creative.
Early reactions to the building, when the still-drying concrete galleries were unveiled last year without any art on the walls, focused on the splotches and water stains. Give the concrete time, Zumthor responded. It will age and mellow.
Those stains and fissures have now started to morph into spidery patterns and delicate veils. In rooms that previously looked like bunkers, the walls are painted in colored pigments mixed with chemicals that bond with the concrete to transfigure the irregularities. The colors are deep and rich. The effect is akin to textured fabric.
Govan and Zumthor often talked over the years about the architecture’s emotional impact, and the feelings that the building ought to provoke when people interact with art. That experiential talk sounded glib to skeptics — shorthand for Barnum & Bailey. It’s not how curators traditionally describe the purpose of a museum.
Some curators were unhappy and left. I interviewed a few of the ones who remained. They described how the building has required them to think outside their silos in sometimes uncomfortable ways, across departments, organizing themed, not chronological or nationalist, displays.
But they said that the building’s layout also feels openhearted and has given them and LACMA’s collection a new lease on life.
Some history might be helpful here.
During the 1960s, LACMA split off from the Los Angeles County Museum of Science, History and Art at Exposition Park and moved to county property along Wilshire’s Miracle Mile.
Two L.A. titans back then — the financier Howard F. Ahmanson and industrialist Norton Simon — led the museum’s board. Ahmanson favored the architect Edward Durell Stone to design the new museum. Simon backed Mies van der Rohe.
They settled on William Pereira, an affable Oscar winner for special effects who became the architect of midcentury L.A. icons like the Theme Building, at LAX. For LACMA, he came up with a trio of lightly decorative modernist pavilions organized around leaky fountains whose pools blackened when oil leached out of the tar pits.
The collection outgrew Pereira’s buildings by the 1980s, when LACMA built an addition by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates and a wing by the architect Bruce Goff to house a private collection of Japanese art.
Goff was a kind of genius. But the campus was a hodgepodge. More glamorous art museums like MOCA and the Getty were stealing the spotlight in L.A.
Govan arrived in 2006. He oversaw the completion of two more wings, undistinguished buildings by Renzo Piano, that doubled LACMA’s display space. Piano also made some improvements to the layout of the campus. But Govan had plans of his own.
Salvaging Pereira’s architecture and the Hardy Holzman building were fool’s errands, he announced. That infuriated Angelenos nostalgic for Pereira, who favored preservation over demolition, but Govan sold county officials on his plan.
He would need $125 million in public funds, he told them, to build Zumthor’s project. Fixing Pereira would cost taxpayers some multiple of that. He would get the rest from private donors, he promised.
And astonishingly, he did.
That the Geffen Galleries end up with 110,000 square feet of display space, 10,000 fewer than the Pereira buildings had totaled, became a particular fixation of some detractors. What sane, responsible public museum, they asked, spends hundreds of millions of dollars to shrink its institution?
Govan pointed to those wings by Piano, which had doubled LACMA’s display area.
But Zumthor’s building turns out to be its own best response. It’s hard to imagine visitors wishing it were any larger. Wending through the Geffen Galleries is intense. Views of the city provide distraction and joy. The new building romances Los Angeles. Where it curls over the street, spreading an arm across Wilshire, it suggests a civic embrace. Wraparound windows offer killer views over the city.
The sun sifts through curtains made of sputtered chrome that Govan commissioned from Reiko Sudo, a textile artist. The curtains cast shadows across walls and floors that shift over the course of the day, making the galleries seem alive. L.A. twinkles and beckons through the fabric.
Where the new museum meets the street, it’s less seductive. Landscaping remains sketchy. Stairs are steep and forbidding. The splotchiness of the concrete on the exterior will mellow, too, but it’s still distracting.
It hasn’t helped that the county insists on a fence, separating the museum from the sidewalk. The new LACMA presents a singular opportunity to expand the public square at the geographic heart of the city into a magnetic urban center, alongside the tar pits, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and a new metro station. Visitors are going to expect more than jumbo sculptures, cafe chairs and a few palm trees in the hardscaped plazas.
When I visited the museum the other day, curators were finishing up art installations in the painted rooms, which looked sumptuous yet felt monastic. I was reminded of the chapel Zumthor designed for the farmers outside Cologne. It involved the construction of a tepee made from spruce trees, encased in framed concrete.
Zumthor instructed the farmers to burn the logs.
What remained was a cone-shaped void, large enough to accommodate a few worshipers, with an oculus where the logs had been tethered, open to the sky. A single door led through a tunnel into the chapel.
The concrete bore the blackened impressions of the burned wood and retained some of its smell. A number of winters ago I found myself alone in the chapel. The light was blue and soft. Snow drifted through the oculus. The silence felt visceral. It seemed to vibrate.
I hadn’t quite felt that same rush again, until now.
Michael Kimmelman is The Times’s architecture critic and the founder and editor-at-large of Headway, a team of journalists focused on large global challenges and paths to progress. He has reported from more than 40 countries and was previously chief art critic.
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