Museum or Architect? Or Why Not Shoot the Messenger?

This week’s blog was planned to be about my next-to-last, the Silver Spring Library. But the New York Review of Books passed along an idea I could not resist. How wonderful the Internet has become. Even a retired architect can comment on the great Joseph Giovannini! God Bless DARPA! But, lowly hobbit that I am, I will admit Giovannini knows of what he writes. I hadn’t been following the saga that’s been dragging out over LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). Those crazy kids in LA–only this time it was a Swiss architect stirring trouble.

Some architects are these grumpy, sparse-worded personas well developed by graduate school else doomed to be walked over later in life. I say ‘persona’ because who ever knows a famous person behind the mask? The Swiss architect, Peter Zumthor, comes across in the media as one of these. Iconoclast is a more polite way of saying it. Though his work bears studying. I once heard Zumthor lecture, and found food for thought listening to him discuss the art of space-making. Could be curmudgeon appreciation is an acquired taste.

The Demolition of LACMA: Art Sacrificed to Architecture

In this instance, though, Giovannini finds dubious space-making in Zumthor’s proposed LA’s replacement museum. He begins by pointing out that the four demolished museum building hadn’t lasted more than 60 years, which does seem a short stay in architectural years–like the inverse of dog years. What might have been helpful was if he explained the preexisting campus with its separate buildings, or whether a better master plan could have saved them.

As will become obvious, it’s also possible the museum director didn’t want any distractions from his mission, such as a public discussion of pros and cons.

Original LACMA by William Pereira photo by GeorgeLouis at English Wikipedia, 1965

One of the only two surviving LACMA buildings was designed by the Italian architect, Renzo Piano, whose work lies in mainstream modern. Piano’s addition to the High Museum in Atlanta incorporates Richard Meier’s earlier building paying tribute to that master of white architecture–the color white not the ethnicity. And the addition Piano designed addressing Lou Kahn’s Kimball Museum in Fort Worth is another; instead of attaching itself to Kahn’s perfect form, Piano places a free-standing pavilion in steel and glass as counterpoint to Kahn’s ode to concrete, set facing it across a formal plaza in a reminder of Kahn’s own great urban space overlooking the Pacific at the Salk Institute in La Jolla.

Did Piano attempt a better master plan for LACMA? He was surely capable of finding one. Several searches later, I couldn’t find a plan of it. What I did find on the firm’s website are his firm’s two projects. LACMA’s Phase I held two programs, a new main entrance and the workshop building. LACMA’s Phase II holds an open-plan museum space under another of Piano’s signature museum skylight. The man does beautiful, light-filled public spaces.

Giovannini doesn’t spend most of his text on Zumthor’s design aesthetic for LACMA, though he gets to it. His chief question is why would one spend nearly $1 billion dollars to build a museum housing only a quarter of the exhibit space as what it’s replacing? It’s a fair question.

For the Los Angeles museum, Zumthor has designed an amoeba-like thing in 2D. “Blob Architecture” is a recent fashion that’s awkward at best, a one note tune that’s bound to exhaust itself. Curiously, Zumthor’s design employs rectangular exhibit and support cells floating randomly in a sea blob–as under a microscope.

Plan diagram for the Zumthor design of the new LACMA building, 2020 image provided by LA County

Here’s my take on blob architecture: it seems a stretch. If you need to sandwich free-form wanderings between flat plane slices like Zumthor’s scheme does, you’re creating a basic contradiction in forms. The randomness of the rectangular gallery ‘cells’ might have played a better contrapuntal tune had they followed a geometric order. It’s possible Zumthor spend too much time in science lab viewing samples under a microscope.

Giovannini’s argument is valid: these limited interior galleries will create a frozen vessel for what Michael Govan, the museum director, insists will offer the flexibility necessary to dissolve a past paternity. As one more great white man says of his predecessors.

“He [Govan] was espousing a popular post-structuralist position against overly directive museums critiqued for imposing hierarchical narratives that repress women, minority groups, and cultures marginalized by the mainstream.”

from The Demolition of LACMA by Joseph Giovannini

Giovannini continues bluntly:

“Under the redevelopment plan, the extensive American, European, Chinese, Southeast Asian, and South American collections… will be effectively exiled off-campus, because the fragmentary layout of the new, smaller museum, by design, can’t display them. The floor plan itself breaks them up. Curators will instead fish artworks from permanent collections pooled in storage for perpetually changing theme shows.”

from The Demolition of LACMA by Joseph Giovannini

Again, I have to agree with Giovannini. West Coast museums haven’t suffered from a ‘great white man’ theory of art, perhaps because they started their collections later than East Coast museums, but more because the ‘left coast’ figured that one out ahead of other parts of the country. As an example, I’d offer Vancouver’s UBC Museum of Anthropology, where ‘folk’ art (pejoratively titled) is presented equal to the art of any time and culture.

UBC Museum of Anthropology by Arthur Anderson photo by William E Evans, © 2017

Native American wood carving photo by William E Evans, © 2017

The Raven and the First Men by Bill Reid, Haida Nation photo by William E Evans, © 2017

“The Zumthor design also contradicts Govan’s rhetoric of inclusion. It isn’t a good neighbor. Hovering thirty feet above overly large, sun-baked plazas, this agent of urban desertification creates dead space, rather than touching ground and rooting itself in the cityscape to nurture a neighborhood. An aesthetic trophy, it wants to be alone, even though a building and institution of this scale could act as a catalyst for the formation of a diverse cultural village within the city. As designed, it’s out of touch with the boulevard and neighborhood it imperiously colonizes. Isolated in a moat of air, with inhospitable open spaces beneath the concrete belly, the elitist building is all piano nobile. Museum visitors look down on passersby, and passersby have to look up. The aloof posture encodes the exclusionary social hierarchy Govan professes to banish.”

from The Demolition of LACMA by Joseph Giovannini

Blood on the tracks, to borrow from Bob Dylan. 

For a counter argument to Giovannini, or at least a more neutral one, last month The Architect’s Newspaper published Updated LACMA plans and renderings reveal the shape of the museum’s galleries for the first time by Shane Reiner-Roth. This article includes a nice series of renderings by Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner—the only ones I could find. Looking at them, you can judge for yourself if there’s meat on those bones.

If it’s not obvious from the plans, the museum spans high over Wilshire Boulevard—that’s the downward dogleg toward the bottom, not to be confused with the downward dog position.

“Updated plans of the David Geffen Galleries give a sense of both the ground condition and the space-planning on the exhibition level above. (Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner)”

from Updated LACMA plans and renderings by Shane Reiner-Roth

LACMA floor plans images by Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner

Judging from these plans, Zumthor intends to make no attempt incorporating Piano’s two buildings (to the far left of the blob) surviving the bulldozers. The two disparate styles will clash – for no reason other than Zumthor decided not to play well in the sandbox–a truculent position to adopt to a contemporary’s work.

Curiously, though the entire amoeba is glass-walled, the renderings show the outer exhibit ‘meander’ spaces dim as any windowless museum. Giovannini suspects the southern California sun will burn the artwork to a crisp. It is possible to significantly reduce incoming light transmission by coated, high reflective glass. Though, if it appears to be perennially dark outside, won’t it feel claustrophobic?

The glass industry has made amazing strides in the last twenty years, but if you drastically reduce light transmission, it’s darker; no way around it. And as problematic, the heavier a coating you apply to the glass the more mirror-like and less transparent it will read from the exterior–nothing like the renderings suggest. LA sunglasses perhaps?

In the 80s an apocryphal story told of a mirror glass office building built hard by I-85 coming into Atlanta. The building’s gold mirror glass was blinding drivers in the afternoon; they had to replace the glass.

Though, viewing the renderings, I can’t agree with Giovannini’s criticism of the underbelly of the beast. In LA’s clime of brilliant sunshine, having a well-shaded public space to wander beneath with enough height for sea breezes to blow throw, this might be a wonderful addition to Los Angeles. At least in the wildfire offseason.

The Architect’s Newspaper article claims the LACMA price tag is a mere $750 million. Art’s not cheap. Oh, I kid those crazy LA kids. For about the same price, the Washington Metro Silver Line could have been buried under Tysons Corner and not have blighted the entire area, though I digress.

One way to pull together a disparate collection of buildings is to nuke them all in one fell swoop. This is what Zumthor chose to do. Worked like a charm. There’ll be no mistaking this new LACMA museum as anything but a single entity, however, the two orphaned buildings–the ones recently completed by Renzo Piano that survived the site clearing–won’t have much to do with Zumthor’s sprawling amoeba–mind, a very nicely detailed amoeba.

Le Corbusier (aka Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) proposed nuking a large swath of Paris to make way for his modern city in the sky. Corbu, as we students of architecture call him, was another eccentric Swiss prone to grand gestures. What is it about those alpine meadows and lakes that makes Swiss architects go nuts?

It is quite possible some starchitects and museum directors deserve each other.  Whether their audiences deserve them–or the taxpayers and fund contributors–is another question.  Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers gnaws at the intelligentsia on their short pedestals.

New York’s American Folk Art Museum

I googled Giovannini, curious to learn if he had objected to the previous MOMA take-down of an architectural jewel so that fat ass institution might squat over more of Manhattan like Shelob in her lair. Would it had been true in this case. Whoever participated in destroying such a jewel should be horse-whipped, or at least sent to the corner until they recovered enough humility to be let back into the tribe. This is a tale of hubris beyond any.

Glenn David Lowry, MOMA’s museum director declared, in defense of his decision, that architecture just wasn’t as important as art. Nor as important as Lowry being able to walk from his new multi-million dollar condo straight into his MOMA fiefdom.

‘The floors didn’t line up,’ was Lowry’s patently lame excuse.

Maybe the bloviating ass hadn’t heard, but architects have been solving that problem since Otis introduced an amazing invention called the elevator–and its first cousin the escalator. Beautifully spiraling ramps, steps, stepped ramps… let me count the ways.

MOMA’s destruction of the Todd Williams–Billy Tsien American Folk Art Museum was a scandal of absence. Architects Mourn Former Folk Art Museum Building In the same city as Trump Tower amid other strokes of ego, Williams and Tsien had sculpted a townhouse-sized museum of exquisite verticality–within the boundaries of a New York townhouse.

I wondered, did Joseph Giovannini ever argue against Shelob the MOMA? Yes, sir, he did–from his opening sentence:

“MOMA, the vatican of modernism, was supposed to cut the architectural edge with its new building on 53rd Street, but instead, the blandissimo design now rising will, ironically, wrap around the new American Folk Art Museum like a neutral backdrop, setting off the brilliant, just-completed boutique museum as though it were the biggest architectural model in the MOMA collection. Designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, the Folk Art museum has usurped MOMA’s avant-garde role in architecture.

“The façade looks detonated, with fissures heaving the front wall into angled planes, filtering natural light through tall cracks. Panels of white bronze alloy sheath the façade, its texture crazed with volcanic accidents left from the molten pour.

“Inside, a seven-story slot rises vertiginously through the 30,000-square-foot building to an angled skylight next to a sloped wall, with spaces and floors pushing and pulling in puzzled overlaps that invite visitors to bypass the elevator in favor of the stairs. Curiosity guides you to light.”

from a New York Magazine article, In Brief by Joseph Giovannini

Williams–Tsien’s façade was a series of hammered bronze shields, one nested next to another, like something exhumed from an archeological dig of Mesolithic times. The museum’s interior was a delicate clockwork of interwoven spaces folded one against another, with an intimacy that Shelob found uncomfortably tight. The fat spider needed the entire block, and the Folk Art Museum stood in the way. Right. Like you can’t integrate preexisting conditions.

Some of the best photos of the now-demolished Folk Art Museum by Giles Ashford are included in the Metropolis article, Faust on West 53rd Street: The Demise of the American Folk Art Museum by Karrie Jacobs.

Giovannini, along with a better part of the architectural profession, screamed at the Folk Art Museum’s destruction; little good that it did. Sadly, Giovannini’s article was written before the Grand Pooh-Bah of MOMA declared the folk art museum’s total demolition. In the article he mentions thinking MOMA was saving the façade. Knock it down. It’s in the way of greater art! If I’m ever found in the same drawing room as Glenn David Lowry, you may hear of his ass whipping. Though I suspect he’s found a counterpart in LA’s spider lair. Maybe Govan will put him up for the night and they can discuss it spider to spider.

I heard Billy Tsien speak once. Neither she or Tod Williams are of the arm-waving variety. Neither is their work.

Barnes Foundation Museum in Philadelphia by Williams–Tsien photo by Smallbones, 2012

Their work strikes me more of the meditative qualities found in the modern Japanese architecture of Tadao Ando. 

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth by Tadao Ando photo by Briaande, 2020

Ibaraki Kasugaoka Church of Light by Tadao Ando photo by Bergmann, 2006

“We do not need to differentiate one from the other [house from church]. Dwelling in a house is not only a functional issue, but also a spiritual one. The house is the locus of heart (kokoro), and the heart is the locus of god. Dwelling in a house is a search for the heart (kokoro) as the locus of god, just as one goes to church to search for god. An important role of the church is to enhance this sense of the spiritual. In a spiritual place, people find peace in their heart (kokoro), as in their homeland.”

Tadao Ando as quoted in Nothingness: Tadao Ando’s Christian Sacred Space by Jin Baek, Routledge, 2009.

Great Men of Art

What is it about mega-salaried museum directors who need to be seen as walking on water–or in this case, on hot air over Wilshire Boulevard? Like little demi-gods trying on the role of Zeus. Do they teach that in museum director school? Glenn David Lowry has a sweet Manhattan multi-million dollar condo fully paid for. Michael Govan has an LA mansion. God bless. I just filled out my job application.

The slander about academics, that their fights are vicious because the stakes are so low, seems applicable to the Great Men of Art. Richard Russo’s Straight Man has a hilarious scene in which his stand-in protagonist, the acting dean of a second rate English department, climbs into the attic to overhear the department’s professors arguing over voting to dismiss him. Even Russo would have a problem plotting a story about museum directors any more aspiring to godhood than Glenn David Lowry and Michael Govan.

Were museum directors always like this, or is it just our particular season of the witch? Admittedly, when discussing construction budgets of $750 million, the stakes aren’t small, even if the outcomes are a waste. Not to be a curmudgeon, but how many community libraries could one build for $750 million?

The Seattle Public Library director caught grief for letting his starchitect, the then enfant terrible Rem Koolhaas produce a library with more grandiosity than value. I’ve not been inside the library, but passed it frequently, and I can’t swear it’s a great contribution to downtown Seattle. While it’s true that libraries don’t want to throw their doors wide open to the street, the Seattle Central Library turns its back on what’s outside–save for Seattle’s gray skies glooming through acres of unwashed glass.

Seattle Central Library photo by Ɱ, 2019

Rem Koolhaas–another European–has a showman’s skills, but I suspect his work won’t wear so well. When the gray weather wraps Seattle as it does every winter, a slumping gray edifice, even glass, does little to dispel the depressing lack of sun for passersby. The mass of it (and it is massive) reminds me of a building after the earthquake everyone predicts for Seattle. Perhaps evenings, when the lights come on, the place feels more inviting from the exterior. Perhaps.

I don’t mean to imply that women aren’t just as capable of being blowhards. It’s just that men have been practicing for a lot longer and we’ve gotten it down pat–the whole noble nose with one hand-in-vest pose.

The arguments will continue, well out of sight of the unwashed masses too simpleminded to follow such weighty debates. Recall Leonard Bernstein’s party for the Black Panthers at his duplex on Park Avenue. And of the current GREAT MEN living fabulous lives? I wouldn’t bet they’ll all be gone in a new world. Will their kingly seats be filled with a next generation? Probably. All kings like to sit pretty.