Methodical Process, Radical Result

“Six months ago, I would never have dreamed this.”

Andrea L. Rich, leaning forward on a black leather chair in her pristine office at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, wants to be perfectly clear: The decision to rebuild the biggest encyclopedic art museum west of the Mississippi from scratch was as much a surprise for her as it was for the rest of Los Angeles.

“It wasn’t in the cards,” says the museum’s president and director. “It wasn’t in my cards.”

But on Dec. 5, LACMA unveiled a stunning plan: Instead of merely remodeling its campus on Wilshire Boulevard, the museum would raze four of its six buildings, replacing them with a vast, futuristic structure designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and topped by a translucent, tent-like roof. Instead of compartmentalizing its collection in separate buildings spread across the campus, it would consolidate almost everything under that dramatic roof.

In the days and weeks after the announcement, the museum’s trustees, staff, donors and advisors would echo Rich’s assertion: This brand new LACMA had never been in anyone’s cards. The museum was supposed to get a face-lift, not the wrecking ball.

So how did a fixer-upper become a tear-down? Why did the museum choose a design that its fans call a brilliant clarification of an architectural muddle and its detractors consider merely a $300-million roof?

The first inkling of massive change came Nov. 10. Two days earlier, an architectural competition that Rich and her advisors had organized got underway in earnest. Five renowned firms were in Los Angeles to pitch their ideas. The museum had given each four months and $200,000 to develop a proposal.

Working with a budget of about $200 million, architects were asked to unify LACMA’s six existing structures and to design a new building for Modern and contemporary art. The only building earmarked for possible demolition was the centrally placed Ahmanson, which might stand in the way of a cohesive scheme.

One by one, the architects came before a 10-trustee selection committee, Rich’s nine-member “cabinet” of staff advisors and three outside consultants. Each contender had exactly two hours to make his case and answer questions.

The contest got rolling with Jean Nouvel of Paris at 6 p.m. on Nov. 8. Thom Mayne of Morphosis in Santa Monica made his pitch the next morning, followed by Daniel Libeskind of Berlin. On the final day, Koolhaas appeared at 10 a.m., Steven Holl of New York at 1 p.m.

By all accounts, they put on quite a show.

“Jean Nouvel and his team were a little rumpled; they had that very Parisian, world-weary quality,” says Bruce Robertson, chief curator of American art and an official note-taker for Rich’s cabinet. “Daniel Libeskind is short and lively and sort of sprightly. Thom Mayne came across as a Los Angeles architect with a really passionate, expressive language. Steven Holl and his associates were all dressed in black and clearly from Manhattan; he was quiet and very serious.”

Koolhaas, 57, winner of architecture’s Nobel, the Pritzker Prize, and as well known for his radical theories as for his actual buildings, was casual--sans coat or tie. Robertson calls him “reserved but almost aggressively incisive.” Koolhaas put up a slide summarizing what the museum had requested and, says Robertson, told the assembly: “Look, anything that begins with the words ‘link’ or ‘unite’ is doomed to failure. You are not going to get anything good if you take this approach, so I am throwing it out.”

His alternative was a clean slate: demolishing everything except the museum’s Japanese Pavilion and the old May Co. building now known as LACMA West.

“There was a gasp,” says Keith Wilson, chief curator of Asian art. Koolhaas said his team had tried to follow the museum’s directions but couldn’t. LACMA’s existing sprawl, he argued in a spiral-bound presentation book, “inhibits the full unfolding of its potential” and “the clarity of its collections.” A consolidated museum would open up more of the surrounding park and “create a sense of coherence and ... presence that this museum has lacked for decades.”

The trustees expected to spend a lot of money on renovation, including seismic upgrades, asbestos removal and the replacement of mechanical systems. But Koolhaas questioned that approach: Why put 65% of the construction budget into renovation when his plan would use 67% of the money for new construction?

Then there was the art itself. Putting most of the collection under one roof, on one floor, “in a way that is both architecturally dramatic and educationally transparent,” Koolhaas said, would create new perspectives on related developments in different cultures.

Focusing on the recent reorganization of LACMA’s curatorial departments into “centers” for American, Asian, European, Latin American, and Modern and contemporary art, he showed how each umbrella category could unfold independently while allowing visitors to make connections on crisscrossing pathways.

Koolhaas conceived of a layered structure, with an open-air plaza sandwiched between subterranean offices and exhibition space supported by slender columns. Compared with the multi-part creations of his competitors, Koolhaas’ simple rectangular model initially “looked like nothing at all,” Robertson says.

Still, it was the only one to be illuminated from within, and it had a seductive glow. “I was unable to stay in my seat,” Wilson remembers. “A few of us got up and looked. We just had to see what he was talking about.”

If the curators were a little awestruck, they were not alone.

“I was stunned,” says Walter L. Weisman, chairman of LACMA’s board of trustees and its architect selection committee. “It took some time for the implications to sink in.”

“Four of the five architects followed the instructions,” trustee and donor Eli Broad says. “Then along comes Rem Koolhaas.”

Rich asked her cabinet to assess the proposals for the trustee committee, without ranking the candidates. Retreating to LACMA West, they compared the five models and reviewed Robertson’s notes.

It soon became clear that Koolhaas and Nouvel were at the head of the pack. Both architects had given serious consideration to the art collection. Additionally, they both left a lot of land to be developed and didn’t sink a big chunk of the budget into parking, opting to leave the existing parking structure intact.

Nouvel planned to install each of the centers in a separate building. Modern and contemporary art would go into a new structure that would link the main campus with LACMA West. But the most distinctive feature of his scheme was to turn the roof into a deck that would replace the existing plaza.

“It was an interesting maneuver,” Robertson says. “When you are down on the ground, you never think of LACMA as being anywhere in particular, but when you stand on the roof and look out, you suddenly see it in a place that is both natural--against the Hollywood Hills--but also man-made. You have the same sensation as you get looking out from the Getty, but from within the city.”

As for Koolhaas, “there was a rapturous response to the concept of presenting the collection with parity,” Wilson says.

“He showed us the way to do what we wanted to do,” adds Stephanie Barron, vice president for education and public programs and senior curator of Modern and contemporary art, “and that it required, by the way, a fresh playing field.”

But his proposal raised a lot of questions.

“It looked so clever,” says Nancy Thomas, deputy director of curatorial affairs and head of the cabinet. “But we felt that it should be examined in terms of practicality.”

For one thing, they realized his scheme was bound to be more disruptive than the others, which would tackle one building at a time. And what about that translucent roof? Could light really be sufficiently controlled to prevent damage to the art?

“In the end, we decided that the museum’s leaders weren’t in a position to choose,” Robertson says. “So we sent Nancy off to urgently request that the process be slowed down a little.”

The next day, as Thomas made her case, Weisman and other trustees began to smile and then chuckle. “It was a great moment; I could tell that our concerns coincided with theirs,” she says.

Just before Thomas’ presentation, the committee had had a session with the independent consultants: Richard Koshalek, president of Art Center College of Design; Neil M. Denari, then-president of the Southern California Institute of Architecture; and Sylvia Lavin, chairwoman of UCLA’s department of architecture. “I asked them not to rank the proposals, just like the cabinet--but they didn’t obey me,” Rich says. “I think they were surprised by their own unanimity. They are not necessarily viewed as people who would normally be in the same camp on anything, but they were all in favor of Koolhaas.”

On Nov. 13--two days after the committee tallied the reactions and two days before it was scheduled to recommend an architect to the entire museum board--Weisman released a statement. The committee had narrowed the field of contenders to two.

“Nouvel and Koolhaas both addressed all the issues that we wanted covered, but in completely different ways,” Rich says. “We needed to bring them back to get more information so that the committee could make a fully conscious decision.”

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened in 1965, in a three-building complex designed by Los Angeles architect William L. Pereira. An addition to its Hammer and Ahmanson buildings was completed in 1983, and the Anderson Building, designed by the New York firm of Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer, was added in 1986. Two years later, the Japanese Pavilion, designed by architect Bruce Goff, opened its doors. And in 1994, the museum’s private support group purchased the former May Co., a 1939-40 design by Albert C. Martin and S.A. Marx.

“It was an incremental kind of place,” Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky says. “You added a wing here. You landscaped this asphalt over here. You didn’t think about big, bold sweeping initiatives that could change the course of the museum.”

Ask Yaroslavsky and anyone else close to the situation why the change and they will give you a short answer: Andrea Rich.

Rich came to the museum in 1995 after 34 years at UCLA, where she worked her way up from student to executive vice chancellor. She was a controversial choice for LACMA. The trustees had been unable to find a director who was also an art specialist, so they split the top job and hired her as president and CEO, with the understanding that she would find someone to oversee the art programs.

While the art world protested, Rich rolled up the sleeves of her trademark black pantsuits and put her faith in that hallmark of managers: study and planning.

Since the day she arrived at LACMA, Rich resisted pressure to make an immediate splash--raise a pile of money, remodel the jumble of buildings, do something, anything big. First things first, she says. “Once I got my footing, I decided there were five stages that we need to go through.”

First she wanted to get to know the place and fix urgent problems at the nuts and bolts level: updating phone systems, computers and the like. Then came bringing in someone to oversee the art side. But after a short go-round with an outside hire, she added director to her title and promoted two LACMA curators to deputy-director positions--Thomas, a specialist in ancient and Islamic art, and Robert Sobieszek, curator of photography.

Third was a strategic “framework,” which defined the museum’s place in the community, reworked its mission--with education at the core--and articulated a broad slate of goals. When it came to collecting, conserving and interpreting artworks, for example, it set out objectives such as “find the means to play in the international arena” of acquisitions.

In contrast to these essentially internal activities, Steps 4 and 5 called for a revision of the museum’s physical plant and a capital campaign. But, in Rich’s view, a lot of work had to be done before either effort went public.

That approach led to an intense analysis of the collections and curatorial departments, which were variously organized according to media, geography and history. European art curators oversee works from a particular region and time span. Modern and contemporary art curators have an international purview of a relatively short time period. The prints and drawings department is defined by media, but not place or time.

The system led to gaps and overlaps in the collection, as well as a lack of cohesion, Rich says. “We treated time-and-place departments the same as media-based departments. When you do that, you don’t tie anything together.”

The solution was not to abolish the time-honored departments, but to establish those five umbrella centers, which, says Thomas, “gives a structure to natural alliances within our staff. It gives [collaboration] a more official status.”

The next challenge was to figure out how to physically express the new plan. That, in turn, led to a stack of documents loaded with facts and figures that detail every square inch of the museum.

Part one, the relatively slim “Vision Statement,” published in August 2000, set the basic goals of a new design: Unify the divided campus, expand facilities and provide for the centers.

“Facility and Needs Assessment,” published in September 2000, is “a phone book-size document,” says Thomas, that lays out the present space allocations for everything from loading docks to conservation laboratories and projects needs for the next quarter century. It estimates, for example, that LACMA’s current 127,396-piece art holding will increase to 276,917 by 2027.

In December 2000, the full board of trustees gathered at a retreat to consider the implications of all those pages of analysis. “We looked at what would be needed physically to achieve what they had outlined programmatically,” Weisman says. “Translated into physical terms, it indicated that significant changes needed to be made.”

With the board’s blessing, Rich began planning an architectural competition.

“We compiled a very broad list of about 40 names to begin with,” she says. That was soon pared down to about 20 firms. Each was sounded out, and the number dropped further. Renzo Piano of Basel, Switzerland, for example, and the Geneva-based team of Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron said they couldn’t take on another project in LACMA’s time frame. Meanwhile, Weisman enlisted trustees Broad, Donald L. Bren, Robert A. Day, Robert Looker, Robert F. Maguire III, William A. Mingst, Peter Norton, Lynda Resnick and Michael G. Smooke to serve on the architect selection committee.

Next, Broad helped organize a LACMA-sponsored tour of museums and architects’ studios. Weisman, Rich and museum Senior Vice President Melody Kanschat accompanied Broad on what he jokes was “a forced march” through London, Paris, Rotterdam, Basel, Berlin and New York. Weisman recalls it as a whirlwind of airports and appointments that had the participants grabbing cheeseburgers at McDonald’s in Berlin “because Eli wanted to see 42 museums between 2 and 4 in the afternoon.”

Finally, the contenders visited Los Angeles, consulted with Rich about the museum’s goals and checked out the site. The selection committee announced its choice of competitors--Holl, Koolhaas, Libeskind, Mayne and Nouvel--in early May.

Within days of the announcement that Nouvel and Koolhaas were in a runoff for the LACMA job, Rich and company were setting up independent evaluations of both plans. The architects were asked to return to the museum to defend their designs.

“Koolhaas’ plan was based on the premise that we could reuse the plinth, the ground floor, so that we didn’t have to pour money into that,” Rich says. “That needed a lot of explaining. So did the roof. What was it made of? How did it work?”

The system called for air-filled panels made of Mylar membrane. “He brought some engineering consultants from London, along with samples and pictures of places where similar roofs had been in place for 20 or 30 years. We brought in local engineers, a construction firm and cost estimators, and hammered out all the issues.”

A similar set of consultants convened to consider Nouvel’s plan, Rich says. In his case, committee members were concerned about materials for the rooftop deck and how visitors would be protected from rain and harsh sun. They also had questions about connections and spaces between the buildings.

It might appear that Nouvel was a fallback choice, in case Koolhaas couldn’t satisfy the committee. That was not the case, Rich says. “The Nouvel scheme brought the program we planned to the fullest fruition, within the time frame and budget that we could manage. There was significant support from committee members who thought it was a wonderful scheme and quite beautiful.”

Putting it another way, Broad says, “Many of us said that our heads were with Nouvel, but our hearts were with the Koolhaas design.” Once they did “due diligence,” as he calls their inquiries into costs and feasibility, they felt justified in following their hearts.

“The cost,” says Weisman, “of trying to reshape the existing structures and the unsatisfactory nature of the result was such that it was not an option, no matter how brilliant the scheme. Our alternatives were a clean slate, as presented by Rem, or nothing.”

“I think that there was a deep feeling in the selection committee that this had the capacity for greatness,” Rich says. “That just caught them up, the capacity to have something unique in the world. And why shouldn’t Los Angeles have it?”

On Dec. 5, at a regularly scheduled meeting of the full LACMA board of trustees, the 23 members in attendance voted unanimously to build what Koolhaas had imagined.

Considered in 2002 dollars, all six of LACMA’s current buildings cost about $160 million. Now the museum is faced with raising almost double that figure in order to usher in a new era.

The county, which provides about one-third of the museum’s $40.5 million in annual operating costs, helped with a one-time $10-million grant two years ago to pay for developing the expansion and renovation plan (some of that money paid for the architect competition). But all the funds for Koolhaas’ scheme, and more, must be raised from private sources.

Rich hasn’t announced a capital campaign, Step 5 in her long-range plan. She hasn’t even stated a fund-raising goal, although Weisman says the sum will include $100 million for the endowment, which along with the $200-million building budget brings the total to at least $300 million.

But the “quiet phase” typical of such efforts is surely underway. Broad, for example, hasn’t disclosed what his gift will be, except to say that it will exceed his biggest donation to a building to date, $23 million. As daunting as Step 5 is, it isn’t Rich’s only concern. The design is just a draft; virtually every detail has to be refined and may be changed. Meanwhile, the staff has yet to find an answer for the problem of keeping the museum up and running during three to five years of construction. And there are signs of opposition to fund-raising for bricks and mortar rather than artworks or art education. “The board went unanimously berserk ...,” wrote one naysayer in the Times. “At the risk of being blasphemous, maybe there are better places to put one-third of a billion donated cultural dollars.”

But the design also has fans beyond the museum boundaries. Ann Gray, publisher of L.A. Architect magazine as well as an architect and a self-described Nouvel fan, was one who had to be persuaded. “How could they violate the rules of the competition?” she asks. “[But] in seeing Rem’s scheme, the architecture and the contents were in such harmony--I was absolutely won over.”

Yaroslavsky, whose district encompasses the museum, has been enthusiastic from the start. The design “is to the exhibition of art what [Walt] Disney Concert Hall is to the performance of music,” he says. And Art Center’s Koshalek only has applause for Rich and the board: “They took a leap of faith.”

For her part, Rich is as philosophical about the critics as she is about the kudos: No one went berserk; no one leaped.

“I didn’t come here with some big vision,” she says. “I’ve just been bringing people along, trying to get them to think about the big picture. If we hadn’t done a really intensive reshaping of the internal organization around our collections and the physical planning around that,” she says, “Koolhaas couldn’t have come up with that design.” And LACMA wouldn’t have agreed to it.

For Rich, still leaning forward in her black leather chair, it’s just a matter of logic.

“We allowed all of the ideas that were possible to brought to the table,” she says. “This was purely inductive.”

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Suzanne Muchnic is a Times staff writer.