crit: broad contemporary art museum
Piano Out of Tune
Courtesy BCAM
It’s been a rough few weeks for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. First they found out that philanthropist Eli Broad was loaning, not giving, his art to the museum addition he had largely paid for. Then the museum was raided by federal agents as part of an investigation over potentially looted art. Now they have opened a museum that has come under fire for falling short in its design.
Not to say that Renzo Piano’s new Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) is a disaster. It has many of the architect’s trademarks of elegance, craftsmanship, and tasteful deference to art. Spatially, it helps bring unity to a museum complex that has long been disjointed. But it falls short of expectations and of the quality of many of Piano’s other works. This is watered down stuff, not Renzo Piano in top form.
The new addition, composed of two Italian travertine-clad three-story wings to the west of the existing museum campus, adds 60,000 square feet of new gallery space, showing off works by some of the great masters of contemporary art. It also includes a new “Grand Entrance,” a large covered pavilion connecting the new spaces to the old, a covered walkway linking east and west portions of the museum, a two-level underground parking garage, and a new “Grand Staircase” for LACMA’s Ahmanson Building, which helps unite extreme grade changes between east and west sides of the campus and has been fitted with Tony Smith’s Smoke, a daunting, and somewhat menacing aluminum sculpture.
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All these new links have done a fine job of uniting the campus, which has for years resembled an incoherent mishmash of styles and circulation plans (and unlike OMA’s earlier scheme, keeps the older buildings intact). Furthermore, the massing of the new building, whose two wings, separated by a vertical wall of metal louvers, almost perfectly balances the grand scale of the existing buildings to the east and brings a well-thought-out symmetry to the complex (which also includes LACMA West inside the former May Company Department Store west of BCAM), particularly when viewed from Wilshire Boulevard. Their travertine cladding meshes well with the existing building’s weighty surfaces. |
Outside of this, most new elements disappoint. Perhaps most troubling is the new building’s relationship to the street. Despite efforts to shift focus northward with an entrance facing 6th Street, LACMA’s energy still points toward Wilshire Boulevard. BCAM’s bulky frontage basically shuts out Wilshire with blank travertine facades that would be dead-ringers for a department store if the signage were changed from large (and admittedly striking) museum banners to a simple “Macy’s”. The blankness of these buildings is slightly offset by angled sunshades, small and rather lonely-looking side-facing stairway, and a large vertical louver system separating the wings, but, like the murals in front, these elements seem add-ons, not integral elements to the whole.
A north-facing stair system called the Spider made of concrete slabs and red i-beams on the north facade is by far the most interesting and ambitious element. The canopy’s incline continues upward even at the top level, perhaps a suggestion of the museum’s limitless ambitions. Its exposed steel structural components are presumably meant to offset the heaviness of the new building, although they never mesh well with it, and, while quite lively, still appear unresolved. Their landings—physical and visual connections to the building—don’t interact dramatically with the program, although they do provide a nice view of the nearby hills from the top floor. Either way, the Spider seems to face away from the action, minimizing its importance. It fronts no main plaza, like, for instance, at the Centre Pompidou, but instead faces a narrow walkway and (for now) a huge, ugly tent for activities that blocks vistas from the first and second floors. From there, 6th Street seems miles away. Perhaps someday, when new landscapes are made more magical, this back entrance will actually become the museum’s new front. Not so now.
The new plaza, similarly built of a red steel frame with concrete cladding, also seems unresolved: a clunky, strange kit of parts recalling an outdoor high school cafeteria. It appears that the museum hasn’t figured out exactly what it wants to do with this space. Chris Burden’s Urban Light, a wonderful compilation of old lamp posts, further takes away from this spot’s dominance in the area, making it more of a spillover space, not the museum’s heart.
One would hope that with Piano’s track record for creating magical museum interiors, as exemplified with the The Menil Collection in Houston or the High Museum of Art extension in Atlanta, that the interior spaces would justify and offset the exterior. They don’t. Grand ceiling heights work well with the collection’s large artworks, but Piano’s customary flair for dramatic light scooping fails on the top floor, which felt dark, even muddy, on the brightest of California days. Lower floors are equally dim. And while some spaces need darkness to preserve fragile works, the firm does nothing to offset this. A space for Richard Serra’s massive sculptures seems like another afterthought, with the architecture adding nothing in particular. The large south-facing louver system feels like a prison from the inside, or as if you’re stuck inside an air conditioner.
Piano pointed out in his opening remarks that Broad wanted the space to be eminently practical, and that it is—no space is wasted. But this is a museum, not a factory. While it should defer to art, it needs to add its own statement, its own richness, its own magic. This extension does not appear to gather inspiration from its art or from its surroundings. It feels dated and familiar, not—like much of Piano’s work—classic and original. As a Piano fan, I find this surprising and disappointing. But I got the feeling while walking through the spaces that Piano was hemmed in by the calculating demands of Broad (a builder of kit-of-part homes) and of the museum’s board. One gets a glimpse of Piano’s customary talent in his graceful new stairway for the Ahmanson building, which receives dramatic light from far above and aggressively stakes its claim as the building’s centerpiece. I have to wonder how the whole project would have looked if Piano had had free reign to work his magic.
Sam Lubell