Refiguring the Puzzle at LACMA

All is cool and calm inside the galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where visitors peruse the permanent collection and critically acclaimed exhibitions of Arthur Dove’s paintings, the Harlem Renaissance and pictorialist photographs. Outside, however, everything is in a steamy state of upheaval.

Hancock Park--which serves as LACMA’s backyard and wraps around the George C. Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries--has been transformed into a construction zone filled with heavy equipment and mounds of dry earth. On LACMA’s central plaza, the museum shop, information center and ticket booths have been ripped out and covered with wood barriers; volunteers who sell tickets and answer questions have camped out at long tables shaded by big green umbrellas.

Meanwhile at the former May Co. building--an adjacent property acquired by the museum four years ago and now known as LACMA West--the cavernous first floor is being refurbished to accommodate galleries, educational programs and retail space. The building’s most distinctive exterior feature, a vertical gold cylinder in a curved black frame, is covered with a scaffolding so that missing gold-leaf tesserae can be replaced.

But expansive as the changes may appear to be, museum officials say the three current projects are only the start of a sweeping outreach program. “This is really only Phase 1 of a who-knows-how-long project to make the museum more user-friendly,” said Melody Kanschat, the museum’s vice president of external affairs.

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Museum President Andrea Rich and director Graham W.J. Beal are undertaking an ambitious plan to build the Wilshire Boulevard institution’s audience by enhancing its facilities and programs. The idea, in part, is to turn the museum and grounds into a community gathering place.

“We hope this will create an even greater awareness of the fact that there is a lot going on over the museum’s entire campus and that, once you are here, it’s easy to get around,” Beal said of the projects that are currently underway.

The museum opened in 1965 in three buildings joined by a central walkway. But with the addition of new buildings, fences, columns and overhead bridges, it has evolved into a complex that can seem overwhelming or confusing to visitors, Beal said. The park also lost its appeal as it fell into disrepair and was cordoned off from the museum.

The $12-million effort to refurbish the park is a cooperative venture with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, which governs the Page Museum. LACMA is playing the leading role, but the project began with a voter-approved, $5-million grant in county funds in 1993--two years before Rich’s arrival at LACMA and three years before Beal was hired. LACMA trustee Dorothy Collins Brown agreed to donate the remaining $7 million in 1995. Her gift is being used to complete infrastructure improvements and build a new amphitheater to be programmed by LACMA. All the work on the park is expected to be complete in March.

“We inherited the park project,” Beal said. “And, of course, LACMA West was sitting there waiting to be activated.” With those challenges already on their agenda, the two administrators began to assess “all aspects of the museum’s operations, and do things like changing our hours to try to make us more available overall,” he said. “These three projects had individual lives, but we were able to bring them into alignment.”

Landscape architect Laurie Olin already had designed a new plan for Hancock Park and artist Jackie Ferrara had been commissioned to design the 150-seat amphitheater. “But when we started to look at the court and see how we wanted to organize that, we suddenly realized that we had an opportunity to bring the Hancock Park renovation into direct alignment to benefit the planning we were doing on the plaza,” Beal said.

Olin and Ferrara reconfigured their plans so that the amphitheater is directly behind the newly widened opening into the park under the Hammer Bridge, between the Ahmanson and Hammer buildings. A curved fence that doubles as park seating overlooks the amphitheater; theatrical events also can be seen from the terrace under the Hammer Bridge.

Among other changes in the park, about 100 dead or dying trees have been removed; they will be replaced with more than 300 healthy specimens. New lighting will be installed. The entire periphery of the 28-acre park will be fenced, but all interior fences will be removed, allowing visitors to move freely from the grounds to the museum.

On the plaza, a $1.5-million renovation funded by museum shop sales is expected to be complete in September. Changes evolved from studies revealing that visitors were frequently confused upon their arrival at the museum. They couldn’t figure out which way to go either because their view was obscured by columns or there was nothing to direct their attention to plaza-level facilities, therefore their gaze would travel upward to the top of surrounding buildings. Moreover, the shop was encased in dark glass, which prevented visitors from seeing inside.

Working with the Santa Monica firm Kirkpatrick Associates Architects, the museum has developed a design to give the plaza a more human scale, unite disparate elements and provide tools to help visitors navigate the campus. “We have spent a lot of time looking at way-finding, the psychology of the visitor rattling around in our spaces,” Beal said.

The shop, which filled much of the space below Hammer Bridge and encroached on the passage to the park, is being relocated to the southeast corner of the Hammer building, overlooking the Pavilion for Japanese Art. Walking through the site, Kanschat said that lower walls of the new shop will be made of clear glass. The interior will be appointed with inviting showcases and the stock will be updated to include an expanded book section, corresponding to the museum’s permanent collection.

A cafe will be added in part of the space formerly occupied by the shop. The 1,000-square-foot facility is expected to provide snacks and drinks, as well as a room for small groups to meet, Kanschat said. An adjacent space has been allotted for public telephones and an automatic teller machine. “We are trying to provide people with the things they expect to find everywhere they go,” she said.

In the past, visitors have been bewildered by separate booths for tickets, membership and information, so those services will be combined at a one-stop kiosk, she said. An additional kiosk may be added at the entrance from the park.

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All the new architectural elements in front of the Hammer building will be unified by translucent canopies, intended to provide a low, horizontal sight line. The rectangular canopies are expected to help visitors orient themselves quickly and focus on a variety of services and activities.

Steps also are being taken to unify the museum’s main facility with LACMA West. Westside entrances are planned at the corner of 6th and Ogden streets and in the Cantor Sculpture Garden, which will be expanded into the parking lot on Ogden. Lawns have already replaced a former gas station and commercial building on the former department store property.

Inside the five-story building, Donald Battjes, the museum’s chief of operations and facility planning, is working with the Kirkpatrick firm on a $3-million renovation, funded by the museum’s operating budget. The first floor is being reconfigured into three major gallery spaces: an 8,200-square-foot space that will house exhibitions organized by the Southwest Museum, under terms of a partnership announced in May; a 10,000-square-foot experimental gallery to be used by LACMA as an educational space for children; and a 9,400-square-foot gallery for major traveling exhibitions. The former two galleries will be inaugurated Oct. 4; the latter will open Jan. 17 with “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs: Masterpieces From the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.”

Linking the three galleries will be a retail promenade composed of a cafe and shops run by LACMA and the Southwest Museum. The second, third and fourth floors of the building will be used for storage and offices. The fifth floor already has been refurbished as a location for conferences and other events.

All three projects--the park, the plaza and LACMA West--are proceeding apace. But while LACMA officials are reluctant to announce precise completion dates, they already are brainstorming about the next big thing. “We’d like to find a donor with deep pockets so we could really develop this property,” Kanschat said as she walked out of LACMA West and surveyed the lawn around the former department store.