None of the Above

Christopher Knight asks, “Which would you rather have: (a) a good art collection housed in a lousy museum building, or (b) a good art collection housed in a great museum building?” (“Art in a Proper Setting,” March 6).

How about, (c) a museum whose board of trustees spends time and money improving the collection, building up a relatively puny endowment fund, and allocating only enough monies to capital improvements so that the current hodgepodge look of the complex (caused when structural changes dating to the 1980s weren’t as thorough as they should have been, undoubtedly due to the inability of LACMA to raise a fraction of the millions and millions that the Metropolitan, for example, gets for construction projects, not to mention artworks, operations, etc.) is finally addressed.

The fact that Edward Ruscha’s “The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire” is owned by one of the major art museums of Washington should be a reminder that LACMA needs to spend precious time and finite dollars on acquisitions, not knocking down and rebuilding its galleries.

TIM STEWART

Torrance

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Forgive the pun, but Rem Koolhaas’ “translucent, tent-like roof” for LACMA will result in a far from cool house in the summer. Has anyone contemplated the hothouse effect of a plastic roof in Southern California? What about the bankruptcy-inducing air-conditioning bill? Koolhaas’ design is ideal for a cloudy northern city. In perennially sunny Los Angeles, it is wasteful and ecologically unsound.

DANA PARKS

Los Angeles