Museum Board to Pick Architect for Overhaul

Saddled with a complex of clashing buildings, trustees of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art are expected to vote today on a proposal that could transform the sprawling Mid-Wilshire campus into a signature site designed by one of the world’s leading architects.

In the final round of a high-profile competition, a committee that has debated the merits of proposals by finalists Rem Koolhaas of Rotterdam, Netherlands, and Jean Nouvel of Paris will present its choice to the full board and request approval.

“This is the most important decision to be made since the inception of the place,” said Andrea L. Rich, LACMA’s president and director.

Rich, who has kept the proposals under lock and key, declined to describe or compare the two architects’ plans, except to say that changes under discussion “could be extremely dramatic.”

But sources within the museum and county government said the trustees will be asked to endorse a radical plan by Koolhaas to demolish nearly all of LACMA’s buildings and replace them with a vast new structure. Nouvel’s relatively conservative proposal calls for the addition of a major new building and the renovation of existing facilities, the sources said. Both projects are estimated to cost close to $200 million.

“The trustees making the recommendation and everybody else involved have decided that if you don’t go for the more radical concept, you just don’t do this at all,” said a county source who has followed the selection process.

Richard Koshalek, president of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, who served as a consultant to the selection committee, said that he had not been informed of the committee’s choice but that he and other advisors had warned the members not to repeat mistakes made by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York in their redesigns.

“The Met turned its back on Central Park; LACMA can bring its parklands into the concept of what the museum should be. MOMA had some brilliant proposals, but they got timid and went for the most conservative,” he said.

Indeed, MOMA passed on a Koolhaas proposal, which would have created a ground-floor public plaza and a corner tower dubbed MOMA Inc. Critics said the scheme offended MOMA officials by making clear the museum’s relationship to wealth as well as art. Instead, they chose a design by Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi.

One important factor in the Los Angeles decision is that philanthropist Eli Broad--a LACMA trustee, a member of the selection committee and a potential major donor to the project--prefers the Koolhaas plan, sources said.

Broad has emerged in recent years as the city’s leading patron of politics and the arts. He is credited with organizing the financial rescue of another major cultural institution: the Walt Disney Concert Hall, rising on Bunker Hill downtown. He is on the record stating his intention to support LACMA’s expansion and his commitment is said to have grown with his excitement about the project.

“Broad is so jazzed by this thing that he is considering numbers he never would have thought of when they started this process,” the same government source said. Broad could not be reached for comment.

“If Eli wants this plan, he’ll get it,” said another source familiar with the museum’s deliberations.

Robert Ahmanson, a trustee whose family name is on one of the museum buildings that might be razed, bowed out of the selection committee early on. Ahmanson said he resigned because he had too many other obligations.

“I would not object to a scheme that involves tearing down [the Ahmanson Building],” he said. It might be “a matter of dollars and cents,” he added, noting that starting anew can be cheaper than upgrading an old building.

“I am concerned about where the money will come from,” Ahmanson said. Foundations face increasing demands on resources that have shrunk in the economic downturn, he said. As to whether the Ahmanson Foundation will contribute to LACMA’s new building, he said: “I don’t know. I can’t answer that.”

Although architects involved with the competition were asked to work with the $200-million proposed budget, a final budget for the project will be established in the next few months. Fund-raising will take place as part of a capital campaign that will also raise funds for the museum’s endowment, which stands at $82 million, Rich said. “I think there will be major league gifts, but that announcement will come a little later,” she said.

Rich emphasized that any plan approved by the board will be only a preliminary concept, not a detailed design, and that it is likely to be realized in phases over several years.

“What’s important is to present a plan and a vision of the future for this institution,” she said. “Whether that is accomplished in the next year or the next 10 years--and I would certainly like to see it accomplished sooner rather than later--the vision needs to be stated and understood by the general public so people can see where we are moving.”

Along with Rich and Broad, trustees Robert Looker, Peter Norton, William Mingst, Linda Resnick, Michael Smooke and Wally Weisman are on the selection committee. Neil M. Denari, president of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, and Sylvia Lavin, chairwoman of UCLA’s department of architecture, joined Koshalek as advisors. A group of the museum’s staff, including curators and department heads, also analyzed the architects’ proposals and filed a report to the committee, Rich said.

The panel narrowed a lengthy list of candidates to five in May. Koolhaas and Nouvel were in the lineup with Steven Holl Architects of New York, Daniel Libeskind of Berlin and Thom Mayne, the principal architect of Morphosis in Santa Monica. A decision was expected Nov. 15; instead the museum announced two finalists, Koolhaas and Nouvel.

Both are known as cutting-edge architects, with Koolhaas considered the less conventional of the two. He won the 1991 Grand Prix d’Architecture and the 2000 Pritzker Prize, the most prestigious award in architecture.

In its citation, the Pritzker jury called his work “bold, strident, thought-provoking.” His most recent projects include the Guggenheim’s two-museum expansion in Las Vegas, which opened in October.

Nouvel, who designed the Arab World Institute in Paris and has been selected to design the new home of Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theater, has been cited for borrowing from, but going beyond, traditional forms. He also won the Grand Prix d’Architecture--in 1987.

Rich said the decision came down to those two because “they addressed our programmatic and physical needs in the most comprehensive way.”

The selection of an architect might be the first step in establishing a bold new identity, but it is the culmination of six years of strategic planning and reorganizing, she said.

One major change is that the museum’s collections and curatorial departments are now organized into five centers: American, Asian, European, Latin American, and modern and contemporary art. The architects were charged with creating a physical environment that would accommodate those centers and present “a much more coherent story [of art history] for our audience,” Rich said.

The project is also an attempt to unify a collection of disparate buildings that have grown up over 36 years. LACMA opened in 1965 in a three-building complex designed by Los Angeles architect William L. Pereira. The Anderson Building, designed by the New York architectural firm of Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer, was added in 1986. Two years later, the Japanese Pavilion, designed by architect Bruce Goff, opened its doors. In 1994, the museum purchased the former May Co. department store, a 1939-40 design by Albert C. Martin and S.A. Marx.

“This is a world’s fair site,” Koshalek said of LACMA’s complex. “The buildings have a high-impact value and a low-sustaining value. Now the trustees are looking for a different level of achievement that will be respected in years to come and yet also be contemporary in terms of how the collection is presented.”

The county Board of Supervisors, which provides about 30% of the museum’s $40.5-million annual operating budget, was briefed on all five of the proposals.

“The county will be supportive,” the governmental source said, “but the supervisors will want to make sure the money is there. We don’t want another Disney Hall”--a reference to delays caused by shortfalls in funding.

Rich said that fund-raising may be a challenge but that the long-term goal is worth the effort.

“We must look at the biggest picture in the longest range of time,” she said. “We may be in a little bit of a financial dip nationally and internationally now, but this museum is for all time.”

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