LACMA Raze Met With Praise

Tear down LACMA? Is that any way to treat Los Angeles’ primary art museum? The one that occupies a prime piece of property on mid-Wilshire Boulevard, houses a 100,000-piece art collection and offers the public everything from blockbuster shows to scholarly lectures, film series, jazz nights and family days?

A lot of folks seem to think so.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s trustees’ unanimous endorsement last week of Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas’ plan to raze the museum’s four main buildings--Ahmanson, Anderson, Bing and Hammer--and replace them with a huge structure on stilts topped by a billowing tent of a roof has been greeted with mostly amazed applause.

Behind the scenes, some LACMA staff members--who say they have no money to buy art and are constantly being told to tighten their belts--privately ask why the museum’s leadership is putting so much effort into a new building, particularly when the country is at war and the economy is shaky. Even Andrea L. Rich, the museum’s president and director, acknowledges that this is a tough time to launch a fund-raising campaign, but a chorus of praise is all but drowning out dissent and doubt.

“It’s a bold and stunning plan,” said Jeremy Strick, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art. “They are determined to create an architectural monument for Los Angeles that will join buildings on the level of Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall, [Jose] Rafael Moneo’s cathedral and Richard Meier’s Getty Center. “What’s so striking is that they have chosen to address their needs in a particularly decisive fashion.”

Ann Philbin, director of the UCLA Hammer Museum, got the news while she was in New York and e-mailed her response: “I am thrilled that they chose Koolhaas. It’s so exciting for L.A. While it is often painful and traumatic for communities to raze buildings, it is the right thing to do in this case and will serve LACMA well in the long term.”

Curator Elizabeth A.T. Smith, who organized several architecture exhibitions during her tenure at MOCA and is now chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, also lauded LACMA’s adventurous spirit. “I’m exhilarated that they took the leap to energize and transform the museum so dramatically and profoundly,” she said.

Civic leaders also expressed strong approval of the new architectural scheme.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky called LACMA’s commitment to build a revolutionary museum from scratch “a bold and courageous move.” He believes the proposed museum will be a state-of-the-art model and particularly likes the way the plan offers educational and chronological contexts for artworks through “horizontal and vertical” exhibition design. In one direction, the works would be arranged chronologically, in the other, by continent of origin. “It’s unique and customer-friendly,” he said. “I think it’s spectacular and exciting.”

But not everyone shares his enthusiasm.

“Who gets served by this new building?” asked a prominent artist who declined to be named. “Suppose the museum is completely torn up and it isn’t really functional for several years. What is the museum for? Is it so that everybody can have a really fancy building? Two-hundred million dollars is a lot of money to put into a building. You could buy an awful lot of art with that.”

Diana Palmer, a manager of nonprofit organizations, expressed even stronger objections. “Didn’t they just build a building?” she asked in an e-mail to The Times, referring to the Anderson building that fronts Wilshire Boulevard and was added in 1986. “What the heck are they doing this for in a recession, with thousands of people out of work and social service agencies facing drastically reduced contributions. I’m amazed, disgusted and rather offended.

“The new plan is probably fine,” she wrote. “I like Koolhaas’ work--but not now. Maybe in 30 years. I also think the existing buildings deserve preservation, even though they are not the latest thing. It is as if LACMA has to compete with the Disney Concert Hall for a trend-setting architect.”

But much of the excitement about essentially starting anew at the site reflects long-standing dissatisfaction with the cluster of disparate buildings that has grown up over the past 36 years. Henry T. Hopkins, retired director of the UCLA Hammer Museum who began his career as LACMA’s chief of educational services, recalled that the museum’s architecture has been the brunt of jokes since its earliest days.

“About two weeks after the museum opened in 1965, Jim Elliott, who was the chief curator at that time, put his arm around my shoulder and said, ‘Do you know what we have done? We have built the first tract house museum,’” Hopkins said.

Designed by Los Angeles architect William L. Pereira, the museum opened with a trio of pavilions built on a plaza above a pool, so they appeared to be floating. Pereira’s scheme was commissioned as a compromise among the trustees, over the objections of then-director Richard Fargo Brown, who had championed a plan by Mies van der Rohe.

The shadow of that Modernist giant still looms so large over LACMA that in his design, Koolhaas has named a central court for Van der Rohe--and made some points with those who know the museum’s history.

“It’s a nice bit of justice,” Hopkins said.

“When I read about his Miesian court, my heart leaped up,” said Jan Baum, a local art dealer and longtime supporter of the museum. “I always regretted that LACMA’s 1965 plan was not realized by Mies.”

Yaroslavsky said that news of the museum’s plan is so recent that surrounding homeowners’ associations have not yet weighed in. But, he said, “I don’t anticipate any negatives from the community. I think this is a win-win.... Even the people who are going to make the contributions will find a great deal of pride in being part of a civic project that will last for generations.”

Linda Dishman, executive director of the Los Angeles Conservancy, an architectural preservation group, said the organization is pleased that the new plans will leave intact the 1939 May Co. building, purchased by the museum in 1994 and now known as LACMA West. It’s a “phenomenal example of streamline moderne architecture,” she said.

Although a revival of 1960s architecture is underway in Southern California, she said conservancy members fear alterations to the Pereira buildings over the years may have eroded their historic integrity. As for Koolhaas’ plan, “We believe in landmarks of the future as well as saving those of the past,” she said.

Yaroslavsky said the surge of civic architectural projects in Los Angeles is a confluence of three events: an unparalleled economic prosperity during the last decade, the cultural maturation of the city and county, and the rise of “some very public-spirited people who want to do something with the money they’ve accumulated.”

Developer and LACMA board member Eli Broad is a “philanthropic engine” who “will be a major player in this project both intellectually and otherwise,” Yaroslavsky said. Rich has also proved an effective leader who brought new blood to the board and inspired confidence, he said. “If you had talked about a $200-million project at LACMA five years ago, you’d have been committed to observation at an institution. Here we are now; nobody doubts for a minute it can be done.”

LACMA trustees are confident on several fronts. Koolhaas’ scheme is “the most sensible proposal,” said Stanley Grinstein, a veteran board member, partly because it puts 86% of the budget into new construction.

Plans submitted by each of the four other architects in LACMA’s architectural competition use more than half of the money for renovations.

Another trustee, Robert F. Maguire III, a prominent developer who has been intimately involved in efforts to redesign and expand the museum’s site, said the board made “the right decision because you can only do so much to rearrange the existing buildings. LACMA has an extraordinary location in the city, and it deserves a wonderful solution. What we have currently can best be described as a patchwork.”

Koolhaas’ scheme presents “lots of functional issues that have to be worked through,” he said, “but I absolutely think the fund-raising can happen because of the strength of the idea. If you take a building that supports the programmatic vision of the museum and combine that with an incredible architectural idea, you can raise money for the building and the museum’s endowment at the same time.”

If LACMA’s buildings are demolished, it seems that few will mourn their loss. Certainly not Robert Winter, a retired professor of history at Occidental College who is co-author of a series of architecture guides to Los Angeles. Even though the county museum was the chief sponsor of his first guide in 1965, he said it wasn’t included. Since then, the Anderson wing added an “Egyptoid” touch to Pereira’s “glitzy modern” complex, he said.

Angelenos have a reputation, only partially deserved, for tearing down their architecture, Winter said. “It’s amazing how much we’ve saved of early 20th century stuff,” he said.

He joined the cheering crowd that gathered in May 2000 to watch a bulldozer demolish the Plaza Pasadena shopping mall to the strains of classical music. When the county museum goes, he suggested someone play “The Dance of the Seven Veils” from “Salome.”