The Odd Couple: Peter Zumthor and Michael Govan Struggle to Build a Better LACMA

The history of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) tells an intriguing architectural what-if story. When the industrialist Norton Simon and LACMA’s founding director Richard Brown began planning the city’s first stand-alone art museum in the early 1960s, they wanted Mies van der Rohe to design it. The trustees agreed. The building’s chief donor Howard Ahmanson, however, refused to pay for it.

It is interesting to consider how the largest encyclopaedic art museum on the US west coast might have evolved within the rigid confines of a Miesian box. Would the public have engaged more or less? Would the original structure even still be there? It is impossible to say. It is equally impossible to say how American architecture might have evolved if Brown had not resigned in protest and left for Fort Worth, Texas, where with Louis Kahn he went on to build the Kimbell Art Museum, widely regarded as one of the country’s great museum buildings.

All this is ancient history now; so too is William Pereira’s ‘floating campus’ of boxy, marble-clad buildings that was the compromise after Simon and Ahmanson’s eventual détente.

I never got to see Pereira’s ‘temple on the tar pits’ – as Time Magazine dubbed it after LACMA’s opening in 1965 – before the completion of a generally unloved addition in 1986. I do, however, have a clear image of it in my mind, thanks largely to Ed Ruscha’s painting Los Angeles County Museum on Fire (1965–68), which has now outlived the campus it imagined incinerating. I went recently to see the painting (currently on view in ‘Ed Ruscha/Now Then’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York) and was reminded of all the little things I loved about Pereira’s complex: the slender colonnade that ushered you into the Bing Theatre, the teak floor beneath Guido Reni’s portrait of Cardinal Ubaldino in his pink mozzetta, and the way the Ahmanson Building’s atrium gracefully accommodated Tony Smith’s Smoke (1967) when it was installed in 2008. They may not have been architectural masterpieces, but I was sad to think that Pereira’s trio of buildings were no longer there.

The 15-year saga of the project to replace the original LACMA campus – expected to be complete in late 2024 at a cost of US$715 million – has been a story of dubious decision making. That LACMA’s director, Michael Govan, chose his architect without any public input felt misguided for an institution that belongs to the people of Los Angeles County. The choice of the Swiss Pritzker laureate Peter Zumthor, an architect legendary for his unwillingness to compromise on cost or schedule, also felt unwise for a project that would need to be paid for with a combination of public funds and private donations in a city not known for its philanthropic largesse.

When Zumthor’s Jean Arp-like, inkblot design spilled over onto a parking lot owned by the museum on the south side of Wilshire Boulevard (so as not to infringe on the active paleontological site next door at the tar pits), the museum foreclosed on the possibility of developing that property as a revenue source in the future. To further compound the financial concerns, Zumthor’s structure will offer fewer square metres of exhibition space than the quartet of buildings it replaces and almost no back-of-house space, meaning that the museum will be forced to rent off-site space for storage and offices while servicing the new project’s debt load for years to come.

These concerning decisions (and quite a few more) have been meticulously chronicled in a series of articles by Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight, who has dedicated much of the last decade to lambasting the project from every conceivable angle. Knight won a Pulitzer for his efforts, but reflecting on his complaints as a whole, I can’t help but feel that his disdain for Govan seems to overwhelm his objectivity

My first encounter with Govan as LACMA director was a February 2007 conversation with Jeff Koons titled, ‘The Role of Artists in Shaping the Museum of the Future’. For Govan, it quickly became apparent, the talk was an opportunity to unveil his plan to install Koons’s ambitious project Train in the centre of the LACMA complex. The colossal sculpture, comprised of a full-size steam locomotive hanging from a 50-metre construction crane, would have cost US$25 million. Even at the apex of the frenzied 2007 art market, one got the sense that night that Govan was making assumptions about what Los Angeles wanted, and Los Angeles didn’t appreciate it.

Train never got off the ground, but a year later, Chris Burden’s Urban Light (2008) was installed on the plaza facing Wilshire Boulevard, and almost overnight became the city’s most beloved work of public art. Govan prefers spectacle to nuance. He is a showman, but in many meaningful ways, his impact on the museum has been positive. I remember standing in the central courtyard on a pre-pandemic Sunday afternoon, when admission to the museum was free, thinking that I have never seen a public inside a Los Angeles art institution that so closely approximated the dynamic and diverse demographics of the city itself.

If Govan can feel, at times, like an American museum director from central casting, Zumthor can seem like a caricature of a reclusive European architect. They are an odd couple – one all surface, the other all soul. When the project began, the pairing struck me as potentially volatile, but thrilling. I admired the risk of inviting such a talented and uncompromising architect to work for the first time in the United States on a project of such scale. I am disappointed, but unsurprised, to see that 15 years later, Zumthor’s original vision has been value-engineered to within a centimetre of its life. The inkblot has changed from black to beige (amid concerns about heat gain), seven double-height skylit pavilions have been eliminated, and budgetary constraints have stripped the interior detailing to such extremes that Zumthor recently told the New York Times that ‘there are no Zumthor details anymore.’ He has vowed never to work in the United States again.

Despite these setbacks, Govan and Zumthor seem to have remained on good terms, united in their vision of an expansive, horizontal, non-hierarchical installation of the museum’s permanent collection. The ultimate test of the project, after all, will not be how it looks but how it feels when you stand inside among the art it has been built to hold.

Knight is particularly outspoken on this topic. In an open letter to Zumthor written for the Los Angeles Times in 2019, Knight argues that a one-level, non-hierarchical installation will undermine the essential enlightenment concept of the encyclopaedic museum. His rational is so convoluted I’m not sure exactly what to make of it, but his assertion that ‘the museum’s building design is ultimately irrelevant’ suggests to me that he has something very conventional in mind.

LACMA will never compete with the great encyclopaedic museums of the world, it’s just too young, so why not offer something different? Why not build for flexibility that allows juxtaposition rather than isolation? Knight’s implicit lack of faith in the curatorial staff’s ability to rise to the challenge of working with a dynamic interior feels a little condescending, as does his sceptical view of the public’s capacity to embrace complexity. Sometimes a change in context can be revelatory – it may yet be here.

When the museum expanded in 1986 with the construction of Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates’ clunky addition and Bruce Goff’s whimsical Pavilion for Japanese Art (which thankfully has not been destroyed), Knight’s predecessor, the Los Angeles Times art critic William Wilson, slightly unsure what to make of it all, offered this piece of architectural wisdom: ‘time tends to side with daring and flourish, especially in museum buildings because it makes them lovable.’

_{Main image: Exterior view north toward BCAM, Resnick Pavilion, Smidt Welcome Plaza, and Urban Light rendering of David Geffen Galleries at LACMA. Courtesy: Atelier Peter Zumthor/The Boundary}