LACMA
10/26/2008
On my first full day in LA, I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
That's "Urban Light" by LA artist Chris Burden. Those are 202 fully restored, fully operational vintage street lights and, according to a January, 2008, article in the LA Times, they are meant to create a "more fitting entryway to the sprawling [LACMA] Campus." That campus comprises seven buildings, most quite unremarkable, that house more than 100,000 works of art. The highlight architecturally is Bruce Goff's Pavilion for japanese Art.
Its a curvy composition in green concrete and stone, with translucent windows meant to be reminiscent of paper screens. The interior is pretty Jetson-y, in a 1970's kind of way, but definitely intriguing.
The building blends into surrounding Hancock Park...
...home also (in a weird anagrammatical juxtaposition) to the La Brea Tar Pits (art, tar...).
A few years ago, LACMA made press for commissioning then scuttling a Rem Koolhaas plan to demolish most of the existing campus (built between 1965 and 1988) in favor of a new, cohesive start. (There's a good synopsis and some images at arcspace.) Instead, Renzo Piano is overseeing a 10-year "Transformation." The first fruits of that commission are the 60,000 square foot Broad Contemporary Art Museum and the new BP Grand Entrance, a open-air, partly-covered space of which Burden's artwork is a part.
The Broad is a simple but effective building. Entering it is an experience not unlike visiting the Pompidou in Paris: a bright red escalator ascends three stories on the outside of the building to the top floor. Essentially, The Broad a limestone box with red accents, but I'm a sucker for that kind of rich minimalism...
...especially when plants reinforce it even further.
As its name suggests, the Broad is devoted to contemporary art, and LACMA has an excellent collection of that. The highlight for me (and my four-month-old son) was the twisting Cor-Ten maze of Richard Serra's "Band," which occupies the entire first floor of the building.
Between the Broad and a construction site that will (hopefully by 2010) become the Resnick Pavilion (also by Piano) is a temporary landscape of interest. Under the red legs of the stairways and escalators is a very pleasant promenade of potted palms and permeable pavers.
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