Critically assessing Peter Zumthor's proposed 400,000-square-foot redo of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art'or indeed any major project in progress'is a risky enterprise. A sizable privately developed urban project that primarily serves the public tends to get people riled up. All that is much more so these days, since New York's Museum of Modern Art, of which LACMA might be a West Coast quasi-equivalent, has harmed its reputation because of two highly interventionist building campaigns, the first by Cesar Pelli in 1984 and one by Yoshio Taniguchi in 2004. Under no circumstances should the gigantism, commercialization, and appalling design judgment that has ensnared MoMA poison another major museum, and certainly not one as important as LACMA.
Designs are not buildings. Designs are not even half buildings. Designs are promises, flashbulbs of an idea. This past summer, Zumthor exhibited a newly revised design at LACMA, a black concrete-and-glass Rorschach inkblot of a building raised 30 feet off the ground, oozing this way and that around the La Brea Tar Pits, with one part bridging Wilshire Boulevard before landing in a parking lot across the street. However prematurely, we must still try to understand and assess this work, because it is surely one of this country's most important current civic projects.
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