Conceptual, but Already More

“Bold,” “revolutionary”--such words are tossed off so casually today that they have nearly lost all meaning. But the design for a new Los Angeles County Museum of Art campus by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, unveiled Thursday by the museum’s board, is the rare project that deserves such praise.

The design is a temple for a mobile, post-industrial age, set amid LACMA’s bucolic, tree-lined park. To create it, Koolhaas literally wipes away the past, obliterating almost all of the existing LACMA campus. It is a brazen move that transforms a muddled collection of undistinguished buildings into a cohesive architectural statement of piercing clarity. The entire complex is reconceived as a system of horizontal layers, with the exhibition spaces stacked above an open-air plaza and offices. Capped by an organic, tent-like roof, its monumental form will serve as both a vibrant public forum and a spectacular place to view art.

Koolhaas’ LACMA is not a final design; it is merely a sketch, a conceptual diagram. And the demolition of a major civic landmark should not be taken lightly. But the architect’s audacious treatment of the past is what allows him to avoid the mind-numbing collage of vanity buildings that are typical of so many museums. Almost classical in its purity, his design places art back on its pedestal, then breaks down traditional cultural pretensions. Its power, which stems in part from an ability to root such notions in L.A.’s ephemeral landscape, more than justifies LACMA’s decision.

The selection capped a seven-month competition that included four other design teams. LACMA officials originally planned to announce the winner in late September, but the decision was delayed following the terrorist attacks in New York and at the Pentagon. In November, LACMA eliminated three teams--the Santa Monica-based Morphosis, the Berlin-based Daniel Libeskind and the New York-based Steven Holl--but postponed its final choice, staging a runoff between Koolhaas and the French architect Jean Nouvel.

The architects’ mandate was to transform 36 years of buildings and additions into a cohesive design. The original complex, which included three stylized pavilions--the Ahmanson, Hammer and Bing Theatre--clustered around an elevated central court, was designed by William Pereira and opened in 1965. An addition to the Ahmanson Building was completed in 1983 on the court’s park side, and the Anderson Building, which framed a new entry along Wilshire, was added three years later. In 1988, the Japanese Pavilion opened, and a decade later the museum converted the former May Co. building at Wilshire and Fairfax into LACMA West.

LACMA originally envisioned renovating the majority of the complex, with only the Ahmanson Building slated for demolition. The expectation was that a new, modern and contemporary art building would extend across Ogden Street, linking the old campus to LACMA West.

Koolhaas’ first coup was to demonstrate that demolishing the majority of the old campus and rebuilding it could be accomplished within the museum’s specified budget of $200 million. According to Davis Langdon Adamson, the cost estimator for both the Koolhaas and Nouvel projects, the Dutch architect’s plan--which preserves only the parking structure, the plaza and the Japanese Pavilion--will cost about $187 million. By comparison, the Nouvel scheme, which called for preserving all existing structures, was priced at about $230 million.

Koolhaas is known for his radical, conceptual designs. In a 1997 scheme for New York’s Museum of Modern Art, he proposed demolishing MOMA’s ground floor. Its famous sculpture garden was sunk below ground level, and a sleek new tower--MOMA Inc.--was implanted on top of Philip Johnson’s 1964 addition to the 53rd Street building. The design, which was intended as a critique of art and commerce, was rejected outright.

At LACMA, Koolhaas begins his design by preserving the museum’s offices, which are currently entombed beneath the existing plaza. The offices are conceived as a “Pompeian base”--a labyrinthine world that will serve as a fossilized memory of the museum’s past.

Resting on top of this subterranean world, the new, expanded plaza will function as a vast public space, an urban condenser that overlooks Wilshire Boulevard on one side and the park on the other. On three sides, grand staircases carve into the plaza, providing access from Wilshire Boulevard, the existing parking structure and the park. A temporary exhibition space, encased in glass, rests at the plaza’s western edge. Behind it, an outdoor cafe faces the park. Overlooking the La Brea Tar Pits, the Bing Theatre is entirely reconceived as an open-air amphitheater, its walls torn out and its seats enveloped in an enormous mechanized curtain.

Koolhaas dubs this plaza “the Miesian Court,” and the purity of the forms evokes Mies van der Rohe’s classical Modern compositions. But the compressed energy of the spaces--sandwiched between the plaza and the museum slab above--gives it a surreal quality that was never part of Mies’ agenda. Instead, it recalls the dizzying congestion of the modern metropolis, a place for the vigorous exchange of ideas.

The exhibition spaces are raised above this area on slender concrete columns. Escalators shoot visitors up to an orientation gallery. From there, more escalators lead into the various exhibitions. The roof--made of a translucent Mylar membrane--spans the entire museum floor. Supported on a series of delicate steel arches, its air-filled panels are equipped with internal flaps that can be adjusted to regulate flow of light into the galleries.

The roof allows Koolhaas to unite all of the museum’s collections into a richly patterned diagram, which he refers to as the “encyclopedic plateau.” Inside, the departments will be organized as a series of parallel bands: Modern and contemporary, European, American and Latin American, and Asian collections. Alternate paths cut across the lanes, linking the various departments. The roof’s height allows the museum to create additional floors.

The idea is to break down the traditional museum’s monotonous warren of rooms, allowing for an endless number of narrative sequences through the collections. Visitors can follow a chronological timeline through the history of contemporary art, for example, or zip back and forth between various departments. Curators, meanwhile, are free to highlight relationships between the museum’s various historical strands. To reinforce that flexibility, visitors can use a hand-held computer device to map out personalized routes through the galleries or to locate favorite works.

But it is as architecture that the proposal is nothing short of radical. Koolhaas’ design can be read as a critique of the entire history of the modern museum. In its formal purity, it echoes such landmarks as Mies’ 1968 New National Gallery in Berlin, whose sleek glass-and-steel form, set on a granite plinth, is a landmark of 20th century design. Seen from the park, LACMA’s symmetrical rows of columns, capped by the billowing roof, will evoke even earlier precedents, such as Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin, one of the 19th century’s great Neo-Classical temples to high culture.

Koolhaas’ design is a stunning reworking of those earlier models. In raising the museum onto a pedestal, he upholds art’s cultural value. But the architect then demolishes the pretentious hierarchies of the traditional museum. Instead of an imposing monument to high art, the enormous roof and free-form galleries suggest a more informal relationship between viewer and art, one that will inevitably be more intimate.

Such notions are ideally suited to the cultural landscape of L.A. The uniform museum slab evokes the fluid mobility of Los Angeles’ freeways. The open floor plan of the exhibition spaces, meanwhile, recalls Frank Gehry’s 1983 design for the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary, one of the first major art venue’s to be housed in an existing industrial shed. Most important, Koolhaas’ design captures the spirit of the city--its informality, the fluidity of its landscape, and its casual blend of high and low cultures.

But the power of Koolhaas’ strategy becomes most apparent when compared with the other architects’ designs.

Unlike Koolhaas, Nouvel preserves all of the museum’s structures. A sleek, new modern and contemporary art building extends from the entry court across Ogden Street, linking the old complex to LACMA West. Along Wilshire, a 200-foot-long ramp extends along the building’s base, leading up to the lobby at plaza level. The existing parking structure plugs into the lobby from the park.

Nouvel does what he can with an impossible mandate. A series of wonderful rooftop terraces, for example, link the new and old buildings via narrow bridges. The Ahmanson’s atrium is gutted and reclad in bronze, transformed into a surreal outdoor room that is intended to house the museum’s collection of Rodin bronzes.

But Nouvel’s scheme cannot solve the awkward relationships between the buildings. In order to span the distance between the new modern and contemporary building and the existing campus, Nouvel creates a gargantuan lobby--a full 12,000 square feet. The lobby connects directly to modern and contemporary art galleries above. But the connection to the old campus is tortured. From the lobby, an outdoor walkway cuts through the Ahmanson courtyard and back out to the central court--a leftover space that has almost no relationship to the surrounding park.

Other proposals fail along similar lines. Like Nouvel, Morphosis sets a new modern and contemporary art building along Wilshire, to the west of the old campus. The new building is conceived as one in a series of connective strands, with the plaza, the park and parking stretching out in parallel bands behind it. In doing so, Morphosis is able to weave together the complex’s disparate parts. But the firm is barely able to disguise the absolute dreariness of the old buildings. In the case of the Anderson building--a true architectural atrocity--his solution is to simply drape an enormous video screen over the building’s Wilshire Boulevard facade.

Ultimately, the value of the competition was that it allowed museum officials to exhaustively explore a wide range of options before making a rash decision. The failure of some of the world’s most notable architectural talents to come up with a compelling scheme that would save the old campus only makes Koolhaas’ point stronger: The old LACMA is not worth saving. LACMA can now move on, comfortable with its choice.

The museum’s next challenge will be to develop the design to its full potential. The roof has already gone through a number of modifications--at one point Koolhaas considered fabricating the panels out of wood--and it may go through several more. The glass box of the temporary exhibition space dominates the plaza, which detracts from its sense of openness. And Koolhaas has yet to come up with a convincing way to let light filter down into the plaza from above--a critical aspect of the design’s success.

Koolhaas has the talent to resolve such issues. And the clarity of the diagram means that the design is likely to retain its power as it goes through the changes that will come from the inevitable budget crunching and negotiations with museum staff. LACMA, meanwhile, will have to push Koolhaas to take even more creative risks in order to transform a brilliant diagram into an enduring work of architecture.

At the very least, however, Los Angeles will have a monument that embodies the spirit of openness and creative freedom that made the city a bastion of Modernist residential design. In recent years, that spirit has slowly infiltrated the city’s civic landscape as well. Disney Hall, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, the Getty Center are giving the city a cultural depth that it has aspired to for decades but has only recently begun to achieve. In Koolhaas’ hands, that sense of cultural awakening finally reaches its full maturity.