A New Look, A Look Back

When the Museum of Contemporary Art began to install a new high-tech glass-and-steel canopy over its entry court this summer, it seemed a small gesture: something to keep the sun out.

But the $1-million canopy, completed this month, is about much more. MOCA’s ambitions have grown since its beginnings as a lonely outpost for art in downtown’s struggling cultural district. It now sees itself as one in a chain of important architectural monuments that would include Frank O. Gehry’s Disney Hall and Jose Rafael Moneo’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, as well as the ‘60s-era Music Center. As such, the museum craves a stronger architectural presence on the street. By both enclosing the courtyard and at the same time marking the museum’s entrance, the canopy is intended to give MOCA something it has never had: a street-level presence worthy of a major cultural institution more than 10 years after the museum first opened its doors. It is a bid to bind the museum more closely to downtown’s cultural future.

MOCA’s entry has always been awkward. The museum, designed in the mid-’80s by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, is mostly buried underground. Above, the museum building is broken into two, with a bookstore and curatorial offices on one side of an open plaza, and the upper reaches of one gallery on the other. To enter the galleries, visitors descend a flight of stairs and disappear into an underground courtyard carved out of the plaza above. As built, the courtyard staircase had little presence, as if the grand stairs of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art had been shrunk, twisted and turned upside down. The effect was uneasy.

But the shortcomings of Isozaki’s design says less about the degree of importance our culture places on art than about the complexities that arise when the needs of developers mix with the needs of a budding art institution. MOCA has never been just a museum. The building was born out of an unusual 1979 partnership between MOCA’s original board of directors and Cadillac Fairview, the Toronto-based developers of California Plaza who funded MOCA’s construction. As such, the museum site was only a small component in a much bigger plan to create a new downtown business center along Grand Street. Designed by architect Arthur Erickson, California Plaza’s master plan was organized along a pedestrian spine that would run in back of the new development and continue along the museum. For the developer, the goal was for business and art to become one cozy world. Isozaki’s design for MOCA had to conform to that vision.

A series of remarkable restrictions were placed on the architecture as a result. The center of the site had to be left open in order to provide access to the walkway behind. In order to keep the galleries together--something that both the architect and the museum’s board felt was essential--they had to be placed underground.

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Even as the museum opened to the public in 1986, Isozaki never seemed content with his solution. That year, he suggested to MOCA director Richard Koshalek that adding a canopy would complete the design. Koshalek agreed, and sketches were sent back and forth between Tokyo and Los Angeles. In one early proposal, two glass pyramids--an echo of the museum’s rooftop skylights--protruded from the top of a steel frame. The canopy’s entire structure was suspended by cables from above. But that design--done in collaboration with the late Peter Rice, a renowned engineer--seemed overwrought. It was put on hold because of lack of funds and was finally abandoned.

The built version is more subdued. The canopy’s steel space frame is a simple rectangular grid. Rather than be suspended from above, it is supported on steel braces that attach to the side walls of the courtyard. Seen from the street, the canopy gives a hint of the staircase below. But its real success is as a glass roof floating above the courtyard’s cafe. Museum-goers can now loiter over lunch in a space that seems less of an afterthought, in a cozy little world protected from the harsh glare of the sun above.

Isozaki, in fact, refers to the canopy as a “floating cloud,” and the image fits. The steel braces that support the truss are not welded right into the space frame. Instead, they lock into it using thin, crisscrossing tension rods. The triangulated braces themselves taper to four neat points that bolt into the side walls. The glass, a fine grid of gray squares, rests gently on top of this structure, deflecting the sun’s glare. The whole apparatus appears about to gently float away.

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As a structural feat, it is exquisitely elegant. But Isozaki has not solved the bigger puzzle. Set against the heaviness of the building’s haunting, geometric forms, the canopy’s lightness jars. In order to keep it detached from the building, and, thus, maintain that cloud-like image, the canopy is actually smaller than the opening it covers. It’s as though you ordered a delicate set of curtains and they arrived too short for your windows. (A practical note: It won’t do much to stop the rain.)

Isozaki’s efforts to better integrate the new design with his museum only underline that awkwardness. One corner of the canopy’s glass is designed in the shape of an elongated set of curves--as if it were being peeled away to reveal what was inside below. The curved edge follows the outline of the stair rail underneath--a line that the architect once claimed playfully traces the shape of Marilyn Monroe’s voluptuous silhouette. But, in fact, the museum’s forms evoke clean, barren landscapes--not Marilyn. This is a landscape of silence. It is Antonioni’s “Red Desert,” not the “Misfits.” The canopy is part of a landscape of high-tech clouds and open horizontal planes. It hovers--cool and detached.

Maybe that’s the point. While fiddling with the canopy, Isozaki has begun to readdress deep problems created by the California Plaza plan: a centerless museum, underground galleries, an unformed plaza. What he really wants to do is reinvent the past. No canopy can accomplish all that. In the end, it gives good shade.