A Stunning New LACMA Descends Upon a City in Crisis
Key takeaways
- LACMA was to be Los Angeles’s own Metropolitan Museum of Art, an encyclopedic institution to house world-historical objects cajoled from omnivorous collectors like William Randolph Hearst.
- Other critics agreed: LACMA was superficially trite and substantially dysfunctional. “The total impact is singularly oppressive,” the art critic for the Saturday Review lamented.
- Sixty-one years later, how quaint that complaint seems: one poorly conceived arts complex in a city that seemed bound for glory.
The view southeast from the David Geffen Galleries.Photograph by Iwan Baan / courtesy LACMASave this story Save this story Save this story Save this story When the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened its doors, in the spring of 1965, L.A. was a young city in the midst of transforming itself into a cultural capital, with the buildings and institutions to prove it. The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion had just opened; the Mark Taper Forum and the Ahmanson Theatre would soon follow. With the Watts riots still several months in the future, the city, as far as anyone knew, was ascendant.
To create a dedicated space for art—which had previously been tucked in with the dinosaur bones at the Natural History Museum—the county allocated a ten-acre site, next to the La Brea Tar Pits, along Wilshire Boulevard, at a midway point between downtown and the beach. LACMA was to be Los Angeles’s own Metropolitan Museum of Art, an encyclopedic institution to house world-historical objects cajoled from omnivorous collectors like William Randolph Hearst. William Pereira, the local architect selected (over Ludwig Mies van der Rohe) to design the campus, delivered three structures sheathed in chipped white marble, set around a fountain in which Alexander Calder’s tripartite mobile “Hello Girls” frolicked, when the spouts were working, which they usually weren’t.
What a disappointment! “It is—or could have been—an important building, the largest art museum built in the U.S. in 25 years and located in a city second only to New York in importance and second to none in growth and vitality,” the editors of Arts & Architecture wrote. They proceeded to eviscerate the design: the galleries were cramped, the lights cast doubling shadows, and the narrow columns made it look like an office building, of the kind admired by Howard Ahmanson, the project’s lead patron. Other critics agreed: LACMA was superficially trite and substantially dysfunctional. “The total impact is singularly oppressive,” the art critic for the Saturday Review lamented.