The county board of supervisors voted Tuesday to approve the current plan and release $117.5 million in taxpayer funding for it, despite last-minute entreaties from some art and architecture critics who urged the board to vote against the project.
Michael Govan, the museum’s director, in turn, took to the Opinion page of The Los Angeles Times to present his case.
“This is the big green light everybody has been waiting for,” Govan said after the meeting, where leaders of neighboring museums and celebrities like Brad Pitt and Diane Keaton made short public comments of support. “Now we can go ahead with construction drawings and go raise the rest of the funds with the assurance this is going forward.”
In the week running up to the vote, the $650 million project, which is mainly privately funded, received its sharpest criticisms yet. Independent architecture critic Joseph Giovannini and The Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight both described problems with the Zumthor design — a sweeping, one-level structure perched on pavilions that will replace four ailing structures.
They both referred to the county’s final environmental impact report, issued last month, which noted that the proposed building offers only 110,000 square feet for galleries — less space than previous designs — and 10,000 fewer square feet of gallery space than in the buildings slated for demolition. (Giovannini, who said that he had hired an architect to analyze the original buildings, put the loss of gallery space at 53,000 square feet.)
Both critics also wrote that they feared the architecture would undermine the purpose of an encyclopedic museum like LACMA by integrating different collections — from Mesopotamian antiquities to contemporary art — in uniform galleries. (Govan recently decided to merge American art and European painting and sculpture, two major departments, upsetting the critics.)
In one column, Knight called the project “the incredible shrinking museum,” noting that he “couldn’t name another art museum anywhere that has ever raised hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on reducing its collection space.”
Including the county’s contribution of $117.5 million, the museum has raised $560 million. The county plans to issue a $300 million bond to loan money to LACMA, which Govan explained would cover expenses until the pledges come in. (The museum also receives about 25 percent of its operating costs from the county.)
Giovannini wrote that the museum would be assuming an “unprecedented and unconscionable” amount of debt. In his fourth article on the subject in the Los Angeles Review of Books, he notes that LACMA already carries $343 million in debt.
Addressing the question of how much debt is too much, Govan cited the institution’s “A3 stable rating by Moody’s.”
“All big, ambitious architectural projects are controversial,” Govan said in an interview. “But the county has done its due diligence. This project has already been through the fire of scrutiny by so many experts and consultants.”
Responding to complaints about the future of permanent collection galleries, Govan confirmed that the Zumthor plan does not include “purpose-built collection galleries” designed to showcase objects from a particular culture or period but rather seeks to create spaces that are “good for different kinds of art.” Then, he said, “we can move the art as needed over time as our collections and needs change.” He called the decision a philosophical as well as a practical one: “The categories museums and universities use for art are not sacred; they are conveniences and need re-evaluation all the time.”
On the issue of shrinking square footage, he countered that he has expanded gallery space significantly with the addition of two exhibition halls designed by Renzo Piano (the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, known as BCAM, and the Resnick Pavilion) that were built on the campus during his tenure. He also cited recent measurements his staff made of the original four buildings that found the new plan decreases gallery space by only 4,000 square feet.
Nicolas Berggruen, a museum trustee, who is also building a research group known as the Berggruen Institute near the Getty Center, said focusing on square footage — which shifted over time, in part because of environmental concerns — missed the point.
“The truth is, something a bit bigger might be better, but it would be a shame not to go ahead with the building,” he said. “Stopping this project would be bad for the museum and bad for the civic fabric of L.A.; it would show that L.A. can’t get its act together in terms of its cultural future.”
One reason the stakes are so high is that Los Angeles has historically been home to few great examples of public architecture. Many of its most important innovations have been residential, including homes by Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolph M. Schindler and Richard Neutra. Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall, a widely celebrated building that gives Angelenos an image of their own city beyond the Hollywood sign, took over a decade to complete. And Rem Koolhaas’ proposal to overhaul the LACMA campus failed because of funding challenges.
Diana Thater, an artist who has exhibited at the museum, said the Zumthor building, which bridges Wilshire Boulevard, could become a major tourist destination. “I want L.A. to have this building,” she said. “The city needs a beautiful, memorable museum that people will flock to visit,” she added, praising the design for potentially unifying the campus, creating a more expansive, parklike setting and establishing “a horizontality where art from different cultures can be considered simultaneously.”
These days, when she brings her students from ArtCenter College of Design to visit, she said: “I’m always apologizing for the condition of things. I’m sorry it’s not beautiful like Bilbao or the Met. I’m sorry the ceilings are cracking.”
Even opponents of the plan agree that the four buildings slated for demolition, three of which were designed by William Pereira in the 1960s, need to be replaced.
Zumthor, a Pritzker-winning architect, earns accolades for the restrained quality of his buildings and his sensitivity to materials. But some say that his strengths could be a weakness at such a large scale and that he has not built in the United States before.
The architect has not spoken out much about the project, leaving Govan to play the advocacy role. “He makes extremely beautiful buildings,” the museum director said. “People say that he doesn’t know American building systems, but actually he does. And Skidmore Owings & Merrill, who we’ve hired as the project architects, really know them.”
Demolition of the old buildings is set for early 2020, with the opening of the new building planned for 2024.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.