Los Angeles County Museum of Art
(LACMA)
Year / 2020
Location / Los Angeles, California, USA
Project Type / Building Addition
Building Type / Art Museum
Building Area / 436,350 sf
Status / Competition Finalist
The LACMA’s East Campus is an unusual composition of buildings accumulated over fifty-five years. This development is riddled with interrupted circuits, tight stair-cores, awkward gathering spaces, and dozens of dead-ends, forcing patrons up and back down each structure, unless they are prescient enough to locate its makeshift bridges and connectors. It is clear that these architectural afflictions create a jerky gallery experience, hindering the continuous horizontal flow across different periods and scales of art.
As Jean Nouvel said in his 1990s proposal, “The great temptation is to build a heroic milestone which makes you forget the neighboring buildings’ weaknesses. But that attitude would be to use the neighbors’ weaknesses as an assertion.” In a time when architectural fashion seeks to wipe the slate clean, and raw materials are endlessly mined at the expense of the environment, we see refreshing opportunity in LACMA’s quirky left-over spaces. With the requirement of upgrading the existing foundations, we propose stripping the disjointed campus down to its four primary forms: Ahmanson (1965), Hammer (1965), Bing (1965), and Andersen (1986). Taken as independent structures, we can then perform the necessary seismic engineering at the ground, celebrating these requirements in the form of a “super-podium” which re-mixes the chemistry between the four structural islands. As an iconic buffer between the historic buildings and the ground, this base would be clad in a crushed aggregate formed from the newly demolished soft-story, replenishing this cherished elevated level, while enclosing additional pockets of exhibition space at the ground. Generous halls for cultural performance art, installations, and media display define the new park edge, advancing the agenda of an encyclopedic museum, in a contemporary way.
Visually sandwiched between the re-constituted podium and an expansive structural canopy above, the original building masses imply new indoor and outdoor art-spaces, draped in a forest of pin-connected columns. The deep structural canopy is glazed between the existing building rooftops, enclosing the infamous canyon. And from this elevated superstructure, new cable-stayed gallery floors are suspended in the void, augmenting the existing program by 60,000sf, in addition to providing much needed circulation loops across all floors of Ahmanson, Hammer, and Andersen, achieving a total building experience.
The existing mid-century exterior which faced the canyon plaza, now becomes a heroic interior condition, fostering new internal views across the open gallery floors. Pereira’s elevations and their sandstone mosaics function as historical index of the original campus, interfacing with new, lightweight materials, and more open, breathable circuits of experience. As the title implies, this is not about leaving the buildings as they are, but creating a new interface on the buildings’ “inner-face”, like a chemical reaction, where adding an ingredient might transform, mutate, coagulate, and precipitate, inventive and unexpected experiences. It is a kind of architectural cross-referencing, or sedimentation, which embodies the encyclopedic nature of the museum.
From the exterior, these new gallery zones are clad in a dichroic glass stack-wall system, set off from a triple-glazed curtain wall. This vertical assembly spans from podium to canopy structure, filling the new galleries with cool, even light, and redirecting warm, humid air to insulate the large interior. The visual affect of these 3 prismatic figures is that of a “glitch” or a digitized expression of the gap (in space and time) between the original buildings. Colors shift with the sun and create irregular patterns of transparency and reflectivity, an expression of lightness and transience held between treasured mid-century stone facades.
If there is a lesson to be learned from LACMA, and from architecture of the 20th century more generally, it is that urban material (buildings) were piled up too quickly, based in automatic demand and modernist assumptions which campaigned for autonomy and generality. In the 21st century, however, architecture’s primary function is less to do with erecting formal monuments, but rather to pay special attention to the real conditions and real materials which have occupied real space over time. To hear what these weathered patterns and voices have to tell us: the successes and the struggles they have experienced. In the 21st century, where adaptive re-use and the act of transformation has become a necessary cultural act, we see the existing campus as 350,000sf of viable hardware, full of abundance and complexity, which can be cut, revealed, upgraded, and reprogrammed by way of this new gallery intervention. The software, then, of art and curation, may weave and alternate between original display formats (existing buildings), and that of the augmented gallery additions...
...a new interface for encyclopedic art; plugged into the “inner-face” which has been there all along.