Leave it to L.A. to erect a new signature building that “challenges nearly every convention of what a museum should be,” said Sam Lubell in the Los Angeles Times. Twenty years in the making, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new $724 million centerpiece is a megastructure three football fields long whose sinuous single exhibition floor hovers 30 feet off the ground and on one end hurdles palm-tree-lined Wilshire Boulevard. “This is no machine or temple for art. It has the scale of a landform and the shape of a living being. And like all living beings, it is far from perfect.” But the new home of LACMA’s permanent collection reinvents the largest museum in the western U.S. and, in an era when even Southern California seems to have lost its nerve, “stands as a reminder that risk and ambition are still possible.”
It’s certainly “the most significant American museum built this century,” and “not merely because of its architecture,” said Michael J. Lewis in The Wall Street Journal. Michael Govan, LACMA’s director since 2006, aimed to redefine the museum-going experience when he picked Swiss architect Peter Zumthor to pursue the mission. Govan wanted to eliminate the chronological display of an international art collection that spans centuries, inviting visitors to wander among the works unguided, as if in a forest. Unfortunately, the largely formless building Zumthor has created shows “a willful disregard for the way that people experience space” and is “maddeningly difficult to navigate.” The natural light let in by the floor-to-ceiling windows that wrap the half-mile-long gallery space is welcome, but the interior is crammed with 29 boxy concrete galleries that are all “oppressively gloomy.” It’s a confounding place. “Its error is to confuse formlessness with freedom.”
The concrete-and-glass exterior, despite its sweeping curves and amoeba-like form, looks “surprisingly conventional” from ground level, said Paul Goldberger in Air Mail. “You want it to dance a little more.” Stepping inside, however, I was pleasantly surprised. When LACMA provided a preview last summer, before the art was installed, some visitors worried that the endless windows and concrete interior walls would defeat effective display, but rough concrete turns out to be an “exceptionally elegant” backdrop for paintings and sculpture, adding more drama than painted plaster could, while Zumthor’s meandering form “makes you want to meander within it.” The experience of chancing upon remarkable works of art and design as you wander can be “thoroughly engaging,” said Sarah Amelar in Architectural Record. You might be taken in by a 17th-century Dutch master, a court robe from Qing-dynasty China, or a Raymond Loewy–designed 1963 Studebaker Avanti. “I didn’t expect to be enthralled, but I found the art-viewing experience so captivating that I eventually had to be torn away—and can’t wait to go back.”