LACMA Unveils Zumthor's Expansion Plans

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has unveiled Peter Zumthor's design for the institution's expansion plan as part of its The Presence of the Past: Peter Zumthor Reconsiders LACMA exhibition on display until mid-September. The design comes seven years after Michael Govan started in his position as LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director and contacted Zumthor about working on the museum's long-term plans.

The resulting preliminary design, displayed in the exhibition with the large physical model shown here, is an amoeba-like mass that is propped three stories above the ground by seven large cores with vertical circulation. According to Govan, the design features "state-of-the-art energy systems that will produce more energy than they use, [will display] twice as many artworks available and accommodate more visitors while at the same time lowering operating costs, [and have a] futuristic shape that would become an architecture icon for LA." The latter resonates with LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne's assertion that "Los Angeles has produced so few important buildings in the last seven or eight years that it is in real danger of losing its reputation as a center for innovative architecture."

Also included in the exhibition is Rem Koolhaas's 2001 design for LACMA, which preserved the institutions various buildings under a massive roof. Zumthor's design would entail the demolition of four of LACMA's buildings to the east of the Resnick Pavilion, designed by Renzo Piano, who is also responsible for the transformation of the May department store building on the same block into the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Also on the site are the La Brea Tar Pits at the Page Museum, which Zumthor's design cantilevers toward, and the Pavilion for Japanese Art, the only one of LACMA's older buildings that the plan retains.