First Impressions: The Looming LACMA Disaster
- Democracy Chain
- Aug 6
- 6 min read
by Bill Lasarow
August 2, 2025
Nearly a year before it reopens, and the images of LACMA’s newly built David Geffen Galleries have me pining to bring back the old LACMA, or at least a very different new one. I’m old enough to recall William Pereira’s blue collar Ahmanson building. That truly unattractive fountain announced its presence, and the interior’s central atrium featured a vast, empty space that pushed all of the galleries so far out as to make the collection feel like an afterthought. By 1975 the fountain was replaced with a sculpture garden. After that, filling in the atrium allowed for a lot more art to be shown. So that’s what an art museum does!
Fortunately, the museum’s current Wilshire Boulevard campus never sunk into the adjacent tar pits as many imagined it would at the first major earthquake (we’ve had two since it opened in 1965). The museum was originally consigned to the basement of the Natural History Museum in Exposition Park. Mom and her friends were regulars at the Wilshire and Fairfax location — not to consume culture, but to shop at the May Company. That building’s architect, Albert C. Martin, who also designed L.A. City Hall, exemplified the so-called Streamline Moderne style. May Company’s gold cylinder feature on the northeast corner, so awkward as to be memorable, announced you were entering the Miracle Mile much more emphatically than any ordinary sign could have. Now the Saban Building and home to the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the survival of Martin’s original gives it an ironic last laugh. As network TV and movie theaters slowly fade away, for someone my age that ridiculous but lovable gewgaw planted on a busy street corner serves as a reminder of a world that no longer exists. I’m grateful that the Saban Building still stands, if only for a little while longer. Those memories are sweet. For younger generations the more likely response may be “what the fuck is that?”
My point is that perfection of both design and function has long eluded L.A.’s greatest public art museum, maybe by a country mile. So the present-day trustees, in their wisdom, basically decided to scrap the whole damned thing and start over. But the result strikes me as an aesthetic and civic disaster waiting to happen. I sure hope I am wrong about this new amoeba motel. But these eyes can see and the mind still works reasonably well, and I fear that I am right.
Once the works from the collection receive their first installation and temporary exhibitions begin a new outline of curatorial purpose, such negative impressions of the empty building may evaporate. We can only hope. But I fear otherwise. Having driven east and west along the Miracle Mile for my entire life, I began to imagine the museum expanding across Wilshire to make use of a nondescript parking lot the day after the museum’s underground Pritzker Garage opened in 2010.
An addition spanning Wilshire Boulevard always made sense, particularly with the new Metro station opening later this year. With the Fascist Party currently in control of the federal government and the not-so Supreme Court, we are seeing active stirrings of a highly politicized and aesthetically barren return to a Neo-Classical style that fairly announces its imperial pretensions. I guess we must at least take comfort that Peter Zumthor’s failed solution is still far better than any neo-Speer monstrosities to come. The parade of 20th-century modernist styles is to be thanked for having marched us out of the previous oligarch-ridden Gilded Age. This 21st-century model nonetheless suggests that we have reached a low point in that quest for the new. If the political overwhelms the cultural, Zumthor’s vision may end up looking far more adventurous, even rebellious, than it really is. Or it may descend into the aesthetic demiworld of regimentation and repression that caters to the very worst impulses of fascism.
What my eyes see, particularly driving west, uncomfortably resembles the kind of apartment complex I rented in my student days. The new LACMA is hardly a statement of budgetary restraint or populist emotion; those of us who follow such things know the price tag. The fusion of brutalist minimalism and its relentless concrete with the gauzy lyricism of organic expressionism is a too obvious hedging of an aesthetic bet. Radical it most certainly is not. It’s a rehash that promises to feel outdated from the day it opens. And if the museum should ever need to expand vertically, the new building, and squat as it is it has one e-nor-miss footprint, can only stand in the way unless it is, in its turn, entirely demolished.
The perimeter curving corridors face floor to ceiling windows. Are we to be seduced by the views of Wilshire Boulevard that will inevitably compete with the art, whatever art is hung on the corridor walls directly opposite? And those street views lack an inspiring expanse. Nor do they even present the Miracle Mile corridor much differently from what we see in our cars. I’ll take instead the escalator ride up nearby Beverly Center and the unfolding view of the Hollywood Hills it affords any day of the week.
The extended overhangs along the bank of windows repeat the quote of the kind of low budget architecture that had its day in the decades immediately after World War II, now viewed from inside the building. They mean to allow light in and simultaneously reduce the glare. That diffusion is clearly intended to be a strength. But isn’t the main function of such windows to let in the light? So which way shall we have it? We are given to understand that the potential for any long-term damage caused by the hours of the most direct sunlight will be controlled with the installation of drapes or blinds, thus negating, at least at certain times of the day, even that bit of seduction, and adding a distracting visual element. Then there will be the ever-present option either to look at the art or turn in the opposite direction toward the Big Screen. The prospect that the views of Wilshire Boulevard become the signature image representing the largest encyclopedic museum west of Chicago induce a sinking feeling. At least there remains Chris Burden’s installation of 202 restored street lamps, “Urban Light.”
The Director’s plan for the permanent collection is to liberate, or perhaps subjugate, it to regular rotations. Aside from the constant patching of the concrete (which may turn out to be one of the most satisfying visual details of the entire exercise because it will evolve organically), my heart goes out to LACMA’s lighting designers. Perhaps over time both the pattern and presentation of the collection will settle in. Regular museum visitors may be rendered distraught for some years before that happens, however, as they search for beloved works which, once found, may or may not work as well in location A as in location B.
Then there are the interior galleries, which feel compressed and oppressively weighty in spite of their high ceilings, which come into the world bereft of natural ceiling or clerestory light. Particularly the smaller galleries, which when empty feel like dungeons, lacking any feeling of liberating openness. I anticipate many great works will sink into the expanse of monochromatic gray and weight of concrete. It is tiresome just to think about.
Perhaps once the collection selections are installed the hue and consistency of the background will favor many of the works. The endless gray neutrals of concrete will perhaps prove an asset to how we see and understand beloved masterworks from the Olmec Stone Heads to Georges de la Tour to René Magritte to Robert Irwin. But all must either be attached to these unfriendly walls via ball and chain or stand in the gallery space before them.
The timeline for this new architecture feels flipped on its head. The four buildings that were demolished to make way for Mr. Zumthor’s fiasco-to-be — the Ahmanson, the Hammer, Art of the Americas, and the Leo S. Bing Center — could have been updated and poised to welcome a new addition, not removed entirely for what is about to be foisted on Los Angeles.
So, can we go back to the drawing board and take a mulligan? That’s about as likely as getting a redo of the 2024 election.
Bill Lasarow, Publisher and Editor, is a longtime practicing artist, independent publisher, and community activist. He founded or co-founded ArtScene Digest to Visual Art in Southern California (1982); the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles (1987); and Visual Art Source (2009). He is also the founder (2021) of The Democracy Chain. In 2025 he relaunched Square Cylinder with Mark Van Proyen and DeWitt Cheng.
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