‘Calamity’ in the making at LACMA?
Regarding Carolina A. Miranda’s “Remaking the Miracle Mile” [July 14]: “Calamity” is perhaps the word to describe the design process the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has been suffering for the last half-dozen years, and let me stress that it is our taxpayer-supported museum.
“Catastrophe” certainly will be the word to describe LACMA if the $600-million-plus design as feared becomes a nightmare construct and a failed Southern California conceit, orchestrated by a self-aggrandizing art crowd.
I join the chorus of critics and taxpayers to urge the County Board of Supervisors to stop feeding funds to what will be, by the time it is built, a $1-billion mistake.
The board is poised to release $117.5 million for the calamity, its members having been wined and dined and their egos massaged by wily museum Director Michael Govan. Talk about an edifice complex of a starstruck arts administrator of what is ostensibly a public institution.
Meanwhile, the clearly overwhelmed Govan and the museum’s over-his-head architect, Switzerland-based Peter Zumthor, have been putzing around with the design for what seems like dog years, the latest study inexplicably reducing the proposed gallery space, when obviously more is needed to house the collection. Less in this case is less.
As for the proposed design, it is no longer colored black as the muck in the adjacent La Brea Tar Pits, but it is still a biomorphic blob sprawling across Wilshire Boulevard. The galleries might be one floor, as Govan wanted, but the structure is ugly and awkward.
It is time for the county supervisors to bring this farce of a design process to a screeching halt.