Though the long-planned building for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), designed by Pritzker Prize–laureate Peter Zumthor, received the unanimous approval of the L.A. County Board of Supervisors last year, it has been an ongoing target of withering criticism, from ad hoc groups and the Los Angeles Times art critic, Christopher Knight, who received a Pulitzer Prize this year for his dissection of the museum’s plans. The proposed new museum is an amoeba-shaped concrete form that will bridge Wilshire Boulevard from LACMA’s current site to what was a parking lot opposite, with all the new galleries flowing together on one floor. Functions such as education, retail, and restaurants will be housed in the seven pavilions holding up the floating gallery space nearly 30 feet in the air.
The Zumthor museum replaces four structures from the 1960s and the ‘80s, by William Pereira and Associates and Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer. They were works of architecture that Angelenos loved to hate, yet when the wrecking ball began razing them last spring, the Citizens Brigade to Save LACMA sprang into action, and mounted a competition for an alternative to Zumthor’s design.
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