Tag: Peter Zumthor

Govan Eyes Residential Area of Miracle Mile for Future LACMA Expansion

~ Editor

 

“That’s the Only Way to Go…”

Govan Eyes Residential Area of Miracle Mile
For Future LACMA Expansion

Overlay of latest Zumthor design of LACMA. Map courtesy of Google.

The latest iteration of the Peter Zumthor design for a new Los Angeles County of Art was revealed last month. The original oil blob concept has been squared off and its roof has been perforated by rectangular protrusions to allow for taller galleries. The “horizontal skyscraper,” as L.A. Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne describes it, still bridges Wilshire Boulevard.

Its footprint south of the boulevard – on what is now LACMA’s Spaulding Avenue parking lot – appears to have swollen in size to accommodate its new function as one of only two entrances to the museum and as the location of a ground floor 300-seat theater. Thirty to forty feet above this will be a south facing open-air plaza overlooking the Wilshire Galleria condominiums located north of 8th Street between Spaulding and Stanley Avenues.

On March 25, 2015, Hawthorne hosted an event, “Debating the New LACMA,” as part of his Third Los Angeles Project at Occidental College. The symposium featured LACMA Director Michael Govan, making a pitch for the new museum, and a panel of experts examining the pros-and-cons of the proposed re-do – including architecture critic and Miracle Mile resident Greg Goldin, a frequent contributor to this newsletter.

At the gathering it was emphasized that Zumthor doesn’t design on paper as much as he does with models. His process, we were told, is notoriously slow and involves numerous interpretations. But it is clear that regardless of the final design, the new museum will span Wilshire and invade a densely populated part of the Miracle Mile.

Wilshire Boulevard has always more-or-less served as a moat to shield the nearby residential area from the full brunt of disturbances from museum traffic, events, and noise. By lurching south of the boulevard into the Miracle Mile the largest museum west of the Mississippi River will become the hulking next-door neighbor to thousands of residents. This intrusion is fraught with problems – it is the museum equivalent of “mansionization” and will overwhelm the entire neighborhood.

Zumthor’s original design encountered stiff resistance for encroaching on the La Brea Tar Pits. “We love the Tar Pits,” Govan quipped, “but they didn’t love us back.” It is obvious that he has now set his sights on the residential area of the Miracle Mile. At the Occidental College event Hawthorne raised a frequent criticism of Zumthor’s elevated single-story plan for the museum: that it will not easily allow for future expansion.

Here is a transcript of the conversation that ensued:

Govan: To the question of you’re building a form, which came up, which is not easily – you can’t easily add on to. In the land area the only place you can go is up and . . . going up is not that practical. So, what is the future of expansion? One idea would be, if you bridge Wilshire Boulevard, you actually do annex – a hundred years from now, not now, not in the lifetimes of people we know – you could expand a park for Los Angeles in areas, that has been done before, with relatively low density spaces and rental apartments and things. So, you could expand that direction, where you can’t go into the Tar Pits. So, it does provide our successors, by a hundred years…

Hawthorne: [interrupting] So, you’re talking about on Wilshire Boulevard?

Govan: Well, on or around. You have to get across the boulevard to do that easily. Because of the way the Tar Pits frame and you have buildings on the other side. So, that’s the only way to go.

Translation: LACMA has nowhere to grow but south, into the residential blocks below Wilshire. Like the Museum of Modern Art in New York and other museums with global ambitions, LAMCA would gobble up its neighbors.

Govan’s assurance that future expansion will not occur in this century is undercut by the fact that since opening in 1965 LACMA has been expanding (or trying to). By their very nature, major museums must grow or die – particularly in this age of monument building and star architecture. Govan knows this. By stubbornly adhering to the obvious limitations of an elevated single-story concept for a new museum, LACMA has no choice but to move into the Miracle Mile.

The welcome mat is not out.

Click on image to enlarge.

[Image of Zumthor model and bottom graphic courtesy LACMA.]

For additional information:

Los Angeles Times: Peter Zumthor’s Plan for LACMA Undergoes Makeover

Curbed Los Angeles: Peter Zumthor’s New LACMA Redesign is a Lot More Boring

YouTube:  “Debating a New LACMA” – Occidental College, March 25, 2015(actual event begins at the 1:40:00 mark)

MMRA Newsletter, November 2014: LACMA’s Billion Dollar Debt (and Michael Govan’s Very Good Day)

2014 Annual Online Survey

~ Editor

[Miracle Mile Residential Association Newsletter, November 2014:]


Miracle Mile Residential Association
2014 Annual Online Survey

Click on map to enlarge.
In November 2013, the MMRA launched its first online survey of Miracle Mile residents to gain a better understanding of your attitudes and opinions on central issues, such as traffic and development. Last year’s poll had 114 respondents; the results can be reviewed here.

The 2014 annual survey repeats many of the key questions asked in last year’s survey, which will indicate how opinions have shifted (or not) in the past 12 months. While hardly a scientific survey, the poll provides a “snapshot” of the community and helps guide the MMRA in prioritizing our efforts. The Miracle Mile Residential Association is a consensus driven organization and polling helps to ensure that the actions of the MMRA reflect the will of the residents we represent.

The MMRA also uses more targeted polls to gauge opinions on single topic issues. Both the “MMRA Mansionization-RFA-HPOZ” and “LACMA Bridge Over Wilshire” surveys are still open. You can participate in those polls or view the results in the links below.

The annual poll is not just for residents living within the boundaries of the MMRA [see map above], we are also interested in how residents in neighboring areas feel, too. The survey will remain open until December 31, 2014. The results of the annual survey will be featured in the January 2015 newsletter.

We utilize SurveyMonkey for our polls; it is a secure and simple way to gather your input. Participation is completely anonymous and your honesty is welcomed. So, please take a few minutes to complete the poll – there are 60 questions with opportunities to make specific comments. And you can skip over the questions that don’t interest or apply to you.

2014 Miracle Mile Residential Association Annual Online Survey

Participate in the survey

MMRA Mansionization-RFA-HPOZ Survey (May 2014)

Participate in the survey
View the results

LACMA Bridge Over Wilshire Survey (July 2014)

Participate in the survey
View the results

LACMA’s Billion Dollar Debt

~ Editor ~ 1 Comment

[Miracle Mile Residential Association Newsletter, November 2014;] 

LACMA’s Billion Dollar Debt 

(and Michael Govan’s Very Good Day)

Commentary by Greg Goldin

 

Supervisor Ridley-Thomas: Is this Michael Govan Day in L.A. or what? We’re trying to figure that out. Did you know what today was?

Michael Govan: That today was?

Supervisor Ridley-Thomas: Yeah, Michael Govan Day in the city, in the county of Los Angeles? Did you know that? It is. Thank you.

Michael Govan: Thank you.

– November 5, 2014 Meeting, Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors

On November 5, LACMA’s plan to build a new museum that would span Wilshire Boulevard got its first enormous contribution. To help kick off the Museum’s fundraising campaign to build the proposed Peter Zumthor building, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors opened the public treasury and signed a check for $125 million. The gift, hailed as proof of the county’s commitment to art and culture, whizzed through on a unanimous vote, but it seems neither the supervisors, nor the reporters present that day, had read the fine print. The colossal sum was not nearly enough, it turns out, to get the ball rolling on the Swiss architect’s $600 million (and-climbing) oozing mega-structure. So, the Supervisors agreed to kick in another $300 million – this in the form of a government-issued bond to be repaid over 30 years by LACMA’s patrons and donors.

Even for the multi-billion dollar county, $425 million is a pile of money.  One would have hoped that the self-avowed fiscal conservatives on the board – among them, the socially liberal but financially prudent Zev Yaroslavsky – might have questioned how the money would be repaid and what the citizens are getting in return.  Yet, to hear the string of fulsome remarks by the Supervisors themselves [see link below], the mere appearance of LACMA chief Michael Govan was sufficient recompense for the public’s investment. One of the fawning Supervisors declared it “Michael Govan Day” – only to be told that such a decree violated the state’s Brown Act, and thus had to be withdrawn. LACMA’s imperial and expansionist dreams, it seems, justify the taxpayers’ gifts and loans without inquiry, investigation, or a single note of caution.

Some math is useful here. The County’s Chief Executive Officer, William T. Fujioka, laid the facts out to the Supervisors in his November 5 report. The citizens of Los Angeles county will donate $125 million to LACMA – a gift that will ultimately cost the county $10 million a year for fifteen years, topping out at $150 million. That’s the money that made the headlines. Since LACMA can’t raise the remaining $475 million in construction funds fast enough, the county has agreed to step up, to “provide adequate and timely funding for the proposed Project during its eight year delivery schedule.” That’s the $300 million bond, which will saddle LACMA with new debt of $18 million a year – adding up to $540 million over the 30-year lifetime of the loan. And that assumes the price tag for Zumthor’s creation will actually be $600 million. There are many independent estimates that put the figure at closer to $1 billion. Will the county close that gap, too?

If the past is prologue, there is ample reason to question the soundness of these arrangements. As the Supervisors know well, LACMA is already burdened with debt, and those debts have forced the Museum to compromise recent plans, to the public’s detriment.

The story begins in 2001 when LACMA undertook “Transformation,” its self-proclaimed plan to march west toward the May Co. building. For $50 million, that landmark was going to be refurbished to add 20,000 square feet of gallery space, renew the Boone children’s gallery, and carve out office space for staff. But the money had to be diverted because Museum Associates, which runs LACMA, couldn’t repay the $383 million debt it had amassed to build the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and the Reznick Pavilion. During the deepening recession, LACMA couldn’t bear the costs of restoring the May Co. while shelling out $15 million a year for the debt service for the BCAM and the Reznick. Thus, the May Co. renovation was jettisoned.

While everyone’s attention was focused on the delivery of Michael Heizer’s very large rock, LACMA’s finances were sinking like one. Its debt was nearly twice as large as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and almost $100 million more than the Museum of Modern Art. The viziers on Wall Street weren’t as easily diverted by the “levitated” spectacle as the citizens and their elected representatives were. The Museum’s bond rating, then perilously close to a default, was downgraded, which put the institution in the unfortunate position of having to find a way to re-leverage itself.

The answer came when a seemingly friendly marriage was arranged between the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences (which had failed more times than can be recounted to open a museum) and LACMA. The Academy agreed to an up-front payment of $36.1 million to lease the 300,000 square-foot May Co. building and a chunk of real estate along its backside for the next 110 years. The Academy would get a museum and LACMA was free to reschedule its debts. For the Academy, it was a sweetheart deal; for the public, not so. The Academy paid the pitiable sum of ninety-two cents per square foot in virtual perpetuity, when the cost of much less glorious and valuable space across the street on Wilshire is four dollars a square foot and climbing. Govan told the Los Angeles Times in June of this year, “The idea was not to haggle, not to make an issue of money; whatever was fair was fair.”

The difference between market rents and this no fuss, no mess deal comes directly out of the taxpayer’s pockets, since the County already furnishes LACMA with $30 million a year in operating costs. In effect, the County is now subsidizing the Academy, one of the richest institutions – with access to seemingly unlimited Hollywood money – in the universe.

All disappointing evidence that LACMA lacks fiscal accountability. Now it is proposed that in addition to its current annual tab of $15 million in debt service, another $18 million be heaped on. For the foreseeable future, LACMA would be more than $1 billion in debt. What will this staggering sum mean to the County when the next recession hits?

And, while everyone agrees that public subsidies for the largest encyclopedic museum west of the Mississippi are worthy, shouldn’t forking over $690 million (the real price of the debt repayment) have some steely strings attached. For example, who will own the new Museum if it ever gets built? Will County negotiators extract a guarantee that LACMA have free admission when the new building opens? (The Hammer, in Westwood, is now free, and the new Broad Museum, in downtown, will be as well when it opens in fall 2015.) And, at long last, will the public be given seats on the Museum’s Board of Trustees – that exclusive, self-anointing body of the super-rich who govern LACMA?

Even if Museum director Michael Govan’s plan melts into the tar that Peter Zumthor says inspired his design, these questions will remain. If the Los Angeles County Museum of Art  – whose very name embodies its public heritage – is to be a truly civic institution, then what better time that now, on the brink of its receiving more than a half a billion dollars from taxpayers, to ask for genuine accountability and a place at the table for its true stakeholders?

Michael Govan photo courtesy of Aaron Salcido, Zócalo Public Square; Zumthor LACMA model courtesy of Los Angeles Times (© Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner); Levitated Mass photo courtesy of Jen Pollack Bianco, My Life’s a Trip.

Sources:

County of Los Angeles, Chief Executive Office: Museum of Art: Proposed East Campus Replacement Building Project Approval of Financing Concept and Funding for Preliminary Design and Planning Activities

November 5, 2014, Meeting of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors: Transcript

San Gabriel Valley Tribune (3/14/13): Tim Rutten: Financial questions need answers before LACMA swallows MOCA

Los Angeles Times (6/2/14): Film Academy to pay LACMA $36.1 million for movie museum lease

For additional information:

Los Angeles Times (11/6/14); L.A. County supervisors embrace LACMA’s financing plan for makeover

Greg Goldin is the coauthor of Never Built Los Angeles and a curator at the A+D Museum. From 1999 to 2012, he was the architecture critic at Los Angeles Magazine. He is a longtime resident of the Miracle Mile and was featured in the MMRA Channel’s YouTube presentation: “The Miracle Mile in Three Tenses: Past, Present, and Future.” Greg is an occasional contributor to this newsletter; “LACMA: The Sky’s the Limit” appeared in the August 2014 edition.

LACMA: The Sky’s the Limit • Commentary by Greg Goldin

~ Editor

[Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times.]

 

LACMA: The Sky’s the Limit

Commentary by Greg Goldin

[Editor’s note: Last month, LACMA Director Michael Govan announced a proposal to build what he hopes will be a Frank Gehry designed skyscraper on Wilshire, across from the museum’s campus. This project would serve as a sort of exclamation point to LACMA’s plan to bridge Wilshire with a new museum designed by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor.]

It may be another decade or so before the Purple Line extension is complete, and riders emerge from the subway stop at Orange Grove and Wilshire, but the oncoming train is already changing the landscape at the west end of the Miracle Mile. If the money can be found, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will inflate a glass kidney bean off the backside of the former May Co. building and LACMA’s oil-slick-inspired $650 million-and-counting blob will ooze its way out of Hancock Park to bridge Wilshire and occupy their Spaulding parking lot. Just added to complete the troika of architectural razzle-dazzle could be the city’s tallest skyscraper, rising above the Wilshire/Orange Grove subway portal.

The hotel and condominium tower, presumably designed by Frank Gehry, would also have LACMA galleries, with a new architecture and design museum, as well as Gehry’s own archives. LACMA head Michael Govan told the Los Angeles Times, “I’m jealous that New York has a Gehry tower [left] and we don’t. My dream is some beautiful piece of architecture with an architecture and design museum at the base, which would add to Museum Row.”  Never mind that much of Museum Row is being decimated in no small part owing to LACMA’s maneuvering the subway portal onto the very block where buildings housing the A+D Architecture and Design museum and two other private art galleries must now be demolished to make way for subway construction.

LACMA owns approximately one-quarter of the 350-foot frontage on the south side of Wilshire between Orange Grove and Ogden, and hopes to forge a development deal with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority [Metro], Millennium Partners, and landowner Alan Sieroty before the subway construction site is reconfigured as yet another relentlessly dull Transit Oriented Development.

The LACMA chieftain’s instincts may be right – nobody wants another badly-designed building above another badly-designed subway portal – but Govan’s not taking any chances by trying to sell architecture solely on its own merits. Instead, he put a politically correct spin on the proposal. Once Metro opens the block for development, he said, “We know that density is the key to urban living and to the maximization of mass transit — and key to the environment. And so for all the right reasons, this is the right place” for a high-rise.

Thus, Govan shrewdly positions his “dream” as a civic virtue. No one believes this more than LACMA itself, which, like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, would become a major real estate developer. The reassuring urban planning rhetoric is meant to neutralize any opposition by making naysayers into nabobs opposed to leveraging a multi-billion investment in public transportation.

While no one doubts that some kind of building will rise once Metro pulls its construction trailers and tunnel boring machinery off the site, LACMA’s ambition is as naked as it is vainglorious. A Frank Gehry skyscraper, looming directly across the street from LACMA’s main galleries, would be, like Trajan’s Column in Rome [right], a triumphal commemoration of the museum’s self-conceived importance not just in the surrounding neighborhood or city – but in the global marketplace of art.

By adding Gehry to the list of Pritzker Prize winning names on the museum’s all-star roster (Renzo Piano and Peter Zumthor being the other two), the museum will have clothed itself in the raiment of “great buildings.”  Who, indeed, will ever again question the eminent stature of a cultural institution that once made the mistake of building an unfashionably dated and decidedly Hollywood version of the Kennedy Center and dared to call it a landmark destination.

The William Pereira designed LACMA campus, circa 1965.

This, indeed, is an essay into the ways in which the rich and powerful need to express the glories of so much accumulated money and power. Culture is the playground of the moneyed classes – whose wallets, and egos, are the ripe targets of the monument builders. What better way to supply a secular crown than with a building, by a world-renown architect, which bears your name?Nothing new, actually, is happening here with this proposed skyscraper.  From infancy LACMA has regarded itself as not only separate, but also above the status it retains as a publicly funded and owned art institution.  Embossed in the public record is the dirty secret that when the County Museum of Art spun itself off from its parent, the Natural History Museum, the new museum’s board of trustees first aim was to leave Exposition Park for the greener (as in, the color of money) environs of the Miracle Mile, then quaintly situated on the Westside – which nowadays, along with the money, has moved much further west.

When County Supervisor John Anson Ford offered the newly separated art museum a downtown plot of land – speculation is that the site was atop Bunker Hill, where the Catholic Cathedral now sits – LACMA’s board rejected the plan. “[I]t was recognized…that the location…would not attract the enthusiasm of potential donors from the west side.”

This quote, from the board minutes of January 21, 1958, was the sort of blunt comment made by civic leaders before the present era of milquetoast public relations statements. The museum’s leaders could not fathom leaving Exposition Park – and its surrounding black ghetto – only to be thrust into a downtown neighborhood populated by the city’s poor and elderly and black and Native American citizens. Westside money was hardly going to flow toward a location redolent of the city’s intractable underclass.

And, so, the museum spent several years lobbying G. Allan Hancock [right], the wealthy oilman who’d given the county the park that bears his name and contains the La Brea Tar Pits. Repeatedly, they tried to convince him to cede a piece of the 23 acres for their art museum, although it had been Hancock’s express wish to build a “fossil museum” dedicated to displaying the park’s unique Ice Age finds. In 1959, Hancock finally relented, agreeing to give the art museum 7 acres, and no more. The moment the plans for the new museum were unveiled – the William Pereira designed complex that is now destined to be demolished – LACMA began its long effort to aggrandize pieces of the park.

Time and again, LACMA sought to nibble away at the park that Hancock deemed should be permanently set aside for public enjoyment and scientific exploration. In the late-1960s, an attempt by the museum to expand further into Hancock Park met with a global protest. From Kenya, Louis Leakey, the world’s most famous paleoanthropologist and archaeologist, urged the museum to halt its plan, saying that no one would consider building atop a site where the first evidence of mankind was discovered, so why would they build atop the largest outcropping of Ice Age life anywhere on the face of the Earth? That effort flopped, but 20 years later the Bruce Goff designed Pavilion for Japanese Art was completed, taking another bite out of the park.

By then memories had faded, along with the county assurances that Hancock’s final wishes would never be violated. But LACMA never stopped eyeing the park. The first iteration of Zumthor’s modern design for a new museum covered – literally – several of the tar pits themselves. Only when the Natural History Museum, which administers Hancock Park, strenuously objected did LACMA retreat and come up with this latest version spanning Wilshire Boulevard.

In a sense, all of this is prologue, evidence that from the moment LACMA left Exposition Park to the present, an arrogant self-regard has been the chief characteristic of the museum’s stance. Now, in projecting its skyward dreams in the form of a Gehry tower, LACMA demonstrates all of its inherited insouciance, that blithe unconcern that comes with believing your own message and knowing that when you’ve got the money and the power to back it up the sky’s the limit – or maybe not. Actually, there are no height limits along Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile.

•••

Greg Goldin is the coauthor of Never Built Los Angeles and a curator at the A+D Museum. From 1999 to 2012, he was the architecture critic at Los Angeles Magazine. He is a longtime resident of the Miracle Mile and was featured in the MMRA Channel’s YouTube presentation: “The Miracle Mile in Three Tenses: Past, Present, and Future.”

For additional information:Los Angeles Times:
LACMA, Metro Discussing New Museum Tower on Wilshire Blvd.

•••

LACMA Wants to Bridge Wilshire

~ Editor

LACMA Wants to Bridge Wilshire with Revamped Museum Design

 

Swiss architect Peter Zumthor has revised his “ink blot” design for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art [LACMA]. The original design received a great deal of criticism for overshadowing the La Brea Tar Pits. The Miracle Mile Residential Association objected to the earlier plan for encroaching on the tar pits and on valuable green space at Hancock Park.

The revised design avoids impinging on the tar pits by spanning Wilshire Boulevard to an anchoring pavilion located on a LACMA owned parking lot on the south side of Wilshire at Spaulding Avenue. This new design retains the original 400,000 square foot single-floor concept, which will be elevated 30-feet above street level.

Although bridging Wilshire would eliminate impact on the tar pits and help to reduce LACMA’s expansion into Hancock Park, the reconfigured plan raises a slew of new questions and concerns for the community.

A New York Times article on the revised design explained: “The museum receives about a third of its $70 million annual operating budget from Los Angeles County and uses county buildings on county land. The City of Los Angeles must approve construction within its limits and air rights above Wilshire Boulevard. Mayor Garcetti and county supervisors were among the first apprised of the design change, suggesting how much this project depends on the support of politicians and governmental agencies.”

The cost of the project is the subject of speculation. LACMA Director Michael Govan has maintained that the razing of the original museum campus and the construction of the new Zumthor structure – along with an endowment fund – would cost around $650 million. Many architects and experts estimate that the price tag would be closer to $1 billion. The cost of this new design – as well as environmental, seismic, and land use issues – will be analyzed in a feasibility study to be completed in spring 2015.

The New York Times article quotes critics of the design who feel “it would be too dark” — “monolithic” or “cavelike” — for a city as sunny as Los Angeles.” It is a criticism that Zumthor feels he has addressed by creating open-air courtyards in the center of the five glass cylinders that would support the main building.

But Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne feels that the revised plan is “perhaps misguided.” Having such a large structure bridging Wilshire had Hawthorne musing on “…what will it be like to walk beneath it? Will it feel like you’re trudging under a freeway overpass? How will the underside of the building be detailed and illuminated?”

It is too early for the MMRA to take an official position on LACMA’s proposal to bridge Wilshire with a new museum. MMRA Vice President Ken Hixon was interviewed on LACMA’s revised plan by The Architect’s Newspaper: “As we’ve painfully learned the devil is in the details. We’re not the design police. We want good design. We want good architecture. But it’s all about the connective tissue.” For now, he [Hixon] points out, such issues — like the museum’s relationship to local housing, available parking, preservation, street life, and, of course, construction—have yet to be specified. An Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the project is still far off.”

 

The dotted line shows the original shape of a planned LACMA building, jutting out over a tar pit. The solid line, which stretches over Wilshire Boulevard, is the revised design.

•••

What is your initial reaction to LACMA’s plan – is it a bridge to the future, a bridge over troubled water, or a bridge too far? Take our survey and let us know. We utilize SurveyMonkey for our polls; it is a secure and simple way to gather your input. Poll participants are completely anonymous and your honesty is welcomed. Just click on this link:

 

LACMA Bridge Over Wilshire Poll

Top and bottom graphics courtesy of Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner; middle graphic courtesy of LACMA.

For additional information:

New York Times:
A Contemporary Design Yields to the Demands of Prehistory

Los Angeles Times:
Peter Zumthor’s L.A.-LACMA vision in need of update

The Architect’s Newspaper:
For Neighbors, Jury Still Out on Zumthor’s New LACMA Plan

The Miracle Mile Residential Association:
Tar Pits Threatened by LACMA Expansion; MMRA Approves Motion to Preserve Green Space in Hancock Park

 

Tar Pits Threatened by LACMA Expansion; MMRA Approves Motion to Preserve Green Space in Hancock Park

~ Editor ~ 2 Comments

PREFACE: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art [LACMA] touts the new Zumthor plan for the museum as a “proposal.” Their stated goal is to gather feedback on this re-design, but they frequently defer criticism by countering that it is only a proposal – a work in progress. It is a sophisticated strategy employed to ensnare commentators into semantics and make their remarks appear premature. Hence, the museum presents a moving target in order to exhaust critics. Whether it is a plan or a proposal, it is obviously a clear vision of what they would like the museum to be. LACMA’s proposal might be malleable, but their intentions are not.

lacma_zumthor_01_550x327

Model of Zumthor design for LACMA. Image courtesy of Museum Associates.

A lively debate has erupted on the potential impact of the Peter Zumthor re-design of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art campus. On September 24 representatives of the Page Museum and LACMA appeared before the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to address concerns that the sprawling Zumthor building could severely affect the La Brea Tar Pits.

The Miracle Mile Residential Association [MMRA], too, is concerned that LACMA’s plans will not only have an adverse impact on the tar pits but also reduce green space at Hancock Park. At the August 29, 2013 MMRA Board of Director’s meeting a motion was adopted opposing LACMA’s expansion into Hancock Park.

Since its arrival in the early 1960s, LACMA has been steadily encroaching on Hancock Park – the largest public park in the Miracle Mile. The park’s green space provides a sense of well-being to our community and enhances our quality of life. It is where our residents go for an impromptu picnic, to jog, take a leisurely stroll, or to teach their child how to ride a bike.

But LACMA tends to view the park as their backyard. This attitude is evident in the expanding footprint of the new design for the museum – which boldly ignores several County Board of Supervisor’s resolutions limiting LACMA to 6 acres of the original 23-acre park.

The Miracle Mile is one of the most densely populated areas in Los Angeles. Since 2005 over 1200 new apartments have been constructed along Wilshire Boulevard corridor between La Brea Avenue and Fairfax Avenue – and many more are under construction or in the planning stages. The advent of the Purple Line subway extension will bring large Transit-Oriented-Density mixed-use buildings at both the La Brea Avenue and Orange Grove Avenue subway portals – and add thousands of new residents to the Miracle Mile.

Los Angeles lags all the major cities in California in parks per capita and ranks 17th among major U.S. cities. The paucity of parkland in Los Angeles and the ever-increasing population of the Miracle Mile emphasizes the critical importance of the Hancock Park to our community.

Hancock Park is a Swiss Army knife, so to speak – a multi-functional tool. It is most notable for being the site of the La Brea Tar Pits, the largest repository of Ice Age fossils in the world. It is also the home of the Page Museum, LACMA, and the soon-to-be Academy Museum – which will draw an additional one million visitors a year and create yet another strain on the park grounds.

The proposed Zumthor design consists of a single floor building – the approximate size of two football fields – floating thirty feet above grade. This encroachment into the park would upset the delicate balance of Hancock Park by overwhelming its original purpose to preserve and promote the history of the La Brea Tar Pits and, by reducing its green space, demoting its critical function as a public park.

Wealthy oilman G. Allan Hancock gave the land to Los Angeles County to “protect and preserve the La Brea Tar Pits.” The 1924 deed specified that the donation was “for Public Park purposes.”

When LACMA attempted to expand into Hancock Park in 1969 County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn introduced a motion – that was unanimously adopted – stating that: “The possibility of using more of the land for Art Museum facilities has been suggested. To do so would be a mistake. The park is one of the few public open spaces left in the area. Also, the Museum of Natural History is still exploring the tar pits for prehistoric material and it must be able to do this without fear of encroachment.”

History is repeating itself with LACMA’s new plans for expansion into Hancock Park, but the MMRA feels that what was true in 1969 is still true today: to do so would be a mistake.

LACMA Tar Pits overlay