Latest news with #Zumthor
Los Angeles Times
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
The new LACMA is sleek, splotchy, powerful, jarring, monotonous, appealing and absurd
Ever since Brutalist architecture emerged in the 1950s, the style has been polarizing. Concrete might be gray, but public response rarely enters into gray areas. The buildings' raw, unfinished concrete forms, typically simple, are loved or hated. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is nearing completion of its own new Brutalist building, designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, 82, to house the permanent collection of paintings, sculptures and other works of art. For three days and one evening, beginning July 3, museum members will get a sneak peek at the empty interior spaces of the David Geffen Galleries. The fully finished project, with art installed, doesn't open until April 2026. Concrete is not eco-friendly, either in production or in results like heat magnification, and some celebrated architects with a social justice bent refuse to use it. But its visual power is undeniable — a strength of the huge Zumthor design. His poured-in-place concrete gobbles 347,500 square feet, including 110,000 square feet in 90 exhibition galleries and corridors lofted 30 feet above ground atop seven massive piers, crossing Wilshire Boulevard. Some of my favorite art museum buildings are Brutalist in design, like Marcel Breuer's fortress-like former Whitney in New York (1966), and Louis Kahn's refined classicism at the Kimbell in Fort Worth (1972). Brad Cloepfil's Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, which may be the best new American museum built for art in the last 15 years, uses concrete brilliantly to illuminate Still's rugged painting motifs. Zumthor's Geffen doesn't come close. I've written a lot about the long-aborning LACMA project over the last dozen years, focused on the design's negative impact on the museum program, but that's now baked in. (The museum pegs the building cost at $720 million, but sources have told me the entire project cost is closer to $835 million.) L.A.'s encyclopedic museum, with a global permanent collection simply installed geographically as straightforward chronology, is dead, and the Geffen Galleries prevent it from ever coming back. Changing theme shows drawn from the collection, curatorially driven, are the new agenda. Having theme galleries is like banishing the alphabet that organizes the encyclopedia on your shelf. Chronology and geography are not some imperialistic scheme dominating global art. They just make finding things in a sprawling encyclopedic art collection easy for visitors. Good luck with that now. I've pretty much avoided consideration of the building's aesthetics. The exception was a 2013 column responding to 'The Presence of the Past,' a somewhat clumsy exhibition of Zumthor's still-evolving design conception, which has changed greatly in the final form. Reviewing purpose-built architecture is a fool's errand when you can't experience the purpose — impossible for another 10 months, when the art-installed Geffen opens. A press event Thursday allowed entry into the gallery spaces, however, so a few things are now obvious. One is that museum galleries are theatrical spaces — there's a reason they're called shows — and chances are you've never seen so much concrete in one place. Sometimes it's sleek and appealing, sometimes splotchy and cracked. (Surface mottling could soften over time.) But across floors, walls and ceilings of 90 bunker-like rooms and long, meandering corridors, the limitless concrete is monotonous. Grieg's 'In the Hall of the Mountain King' meets Beckett's theater of the absurd. Another is that views from the floor-to-ceiling windows that surround the building will offer lovely, interesting city vistas — welcome relief from the monotony. (Curtains will be installed around the perimeter.) A third is that the light, some entering horizontally from the side windows and a couple thin clerestory slots, but much of it from fixed vertical ceiling cans, is going to be a problem. Those windows are also one of the biggest design losses in the value-engineering, undertaken to control ballooning costs. (Adjusted for inflation, the original Whitney Museum's construction cost per square foot was about $633, Kimbell's was about $469, and LACMA clocks in at $1,400, according to its website. Brutalist, indeed.) The floor plate was originally planned to follow the organic curves of the ceiling plate, with continuous, hugely expensive curved-glass windows linking the two. Now the floor plan is largely rectilinear. The glass panels had to be flat, so the composition is a bit more dynamic. But the roofline overlaps can be jarring. At one end the hovering curved roof looks like a pizza too big for the box below. Also daunting: Art will be hung on all that concrete by drilling holes in the walls and pounding in anchors. Moving the art will be cumbersome, requiring concrete patching. The entire process is labor-intensive and expensive. Zumthor is the sixth architect to have had a whack at LACMA, following earlier efforts by William L. Pereira, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, Bruce Goff, Rem Koolhaas, and Renzo Piano. Koolhaas never got beyond the proposal stage, although his marvelous idea pioneered the teardown-then-build-a-pavilion-on-stilts plan now coming to very different fruition. Only Goff produced a notable building, with a novel Japanese Pavilion that conceptually turned inside out the spiral Guggenheim Museum by his mentor, Frank Lloyd Wright. (Happily, the Japanese Pavilion can now be seen from the street.) The rest were mostly meh, salted with an occasional ugh. Zumthor and LACMA Director Michael Govan pronounce the new Geffen building to be 'a concrete sculpture,' which is why it's being shown empty now. The cringey claim is grandiose, and it makes one wonder why being architecture is not enough. If it's true, it's the only monumental sculpture I know that has a couple of restaurants, an auditorium and a store. Apparently, an artistic hierarchy exists, with sculpture ranked above architecture. That's odd, because we've also been repeatedly told that LACMA built the place to undermine such conceits. Museum officials are still banging away on the absurd claim that a single-story building for art, banishing distinctions between 'upstairs/downstairs,' confers an egalitarian marker on what global cultures produce. Hierarchy, however, is not a matter of physicality or direction, but of conceptual status. Rosa Parks was riding on a single-level bus, not a double-decker, and she knew exactly what her mighty refusal to sit in the back meant. LACMA should be half as savvy. Climb the 60-plus steps up to the Geffen Galleries, or take an elevator, and when you arrive some art will be out front and some out back. Surely, we won't regard that front/back difference as anti-egalitarian. Will the Geffen Galleries be successful? My crystal ball is broken, but I see no reason why it won't be a popular attraction. And that is clearly the museum's priority. An urban environment with a talented architect's unusual art museum design tagged by a monumental topiary sculpture on the main drag — that's a description of Frank Gehry's incomparable Guggenheim Bilbao, the great 1997 museum in Basque northern Spain, where Jeff Koons' marvelous floral 'Puppy' sculpture holds court out front. (Every palace needs topiary, a leafy green power emblem of culture's control over nature; Koons' 40-foot-tall West Highland white dog makes for an especially cuddly symbol of guardianship.) Now the description fits LACMA too. The museum just announced the acquisition of Koons' floral behemoth, 'Split-Rocker,' a rather bland hobby horse topiary that merges a toy dinosaur's head with the hobby horse's head. LACMA is next door to the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum, and the kiddie dino, a natural history plaything, forces a shotgun wedding with a degraded example of art history's triumphant motif of a man on a horse. Govan worked on Bilbao before coming to L.A., and the formula there is being repeated here. L.A.'s eye-grabbing building won't be as great nor its Instagram-ready topiary be nearly as good as the Bilbao ensemble, but when does lightning strike twice? As museums, Bilbao and LACMA couldn't be more different. One has a small, mostly mediocre permanent collection of contemporary art, while the other has a large, often excellent permanent collection of global art from all eras. The so-called Bilbao Effect sent cultural tourism, then already on the rise, skyrocketing. With the David Geffen Galleries, LACMA has put its very expensive eggs in that tourism basket. It might take some time to work. The U.S. is the world's largest travel and tourism sector, but it's the only one forecast by the World Travel & Tourism Council to see international visitor decline in 2025 — and probably beyond. Between erratic pandemic recovery and an abusive federal government hostile to foreigners, worries are growing in L.A. about the imminent soccer World Cup and the Olympics. It's also surprising that the museum is now bleeding critical senior staff, just as LACMA's lengthy transformation from a civic art museum into a tourist destination trembles on the verge of completion. Previously unreported, chief operating officer Diana Vesga is already gone, deputy director for curatorial and exhibitions J. Fiona Ragheb recently left, and chief financial officer Mark Mitchell departs next week. Those are three top-tier institutional positions. Let's hope they don't know something we also don't know.
Daily Maverick
26-05-2025
- General
- Daily Maverick
Home is not just a building — how grief, healing and ubuntu taught me to rethink architecture
The body and the soul of a home When you walk into a funeral home and see an open casket, something feels off. The body is there — intact, recognisable — and yet, the person you loved is gone. You don't weep because the body has disappeared. You weep because the soul that animated it has left. What remains is a sacred museum of memory. Architecture, I've come to realise, is much the same. Buildings are the body. People — their laughter, their dreams, their small daily rituals — are the soul. I didn't learn this from textbooks. I learned it through grief. I grew up in South Africa, moving through 13 townships before I became a teenager. I saw how fragile housing could rob families of stability. My mother prayed constantly that one day we'd have a dignified place to call our own. But just a week before I left on a scholarship to study architecture in Michigan, she died. My father, still fighting to make her dream a reality, died shortly after I graduated. Grief taught me that the loss of home is not the loss of walls — it's the loss of the people, the memories, the love that could have unfolded within those walls. In that way, my understanding of architecture began not with presence, but with absence. Peter Zumthor, the Swiss architect, writes in Thinking Architecture: 'When I design a building, I frequently find myself sinking into old, half-forgotten memories… They are the reservoirs of the architectural atmospheres and images that I explore in my work.' My parents' absence became my first design brief. Their deaths reframed architecture for me — not as an act of construction, but of remembrance. In Zumthor's terms, buildings are envelopes for memory, vessels for presence, and sanctuaries for the human spirit. Building as an act of healing In their memory, I designed two homes — each a tribute to the essence of who they were. For my half-sister in Fourways, Johannesburg, I created a contemporary home, urban and sleek, yet softened with natural textures — warm woods, layered lighting and generous outdoor lounges. It channels my father's cosmopolitan charm, his ability to make everyone feel welcome and his deep sense of ease in the city. The house feels like him: stylish, open, full of life and laughter, always ready to host. For my mother's family home, I designed a neoclassical anchor rooted in heritage. It's a place for weddings, funerals, storytelling and multigenerational memory. The symmetry, tall columns and intimate courtyards echo my mother's grounding nature — her warmth, her quiet strength, her devotion to tradition and family. She wasn't loud, but her presence held the centre. This home does too. These weren't just buildings. They were acts of healing. Built not only with concrete and rebar, but with love, grief, memory and hope. Zumthor describes how architecture can 'absorb the traces of human life' — scratches on walls, worn stair treads, the scent of cooking lingering in a hallway. The soul crisis in modern architecture Yet far too often, our industry forgets this truth. We're in a relentless race to build faster, cheaper, larger. Too many developments rise like mushrooms after rain — technically precise, but spiritually vacant. Designed for spreadsheets, not stories. 'If a work of architecture speaks only of contemporary trends… without triggering vibrations in its place, this work is not anchored in its site,' said Zumthor. The result? Buildings optimised for efficiency but deprived of emotion. Functional, perhaps. Even aesthetically impressive. But inert. When you strip buildings of story and soul, you lose what makes them last — not just structurally, but spiritually. And the consequences ripple outward. Across the globe, we're seeing a silent crisis in our cities: rising mental health struggles, triggered not only by socioeconomic pressures but by the very spaces we inhabit. Cramped apartments stacked into glass-and-steel towers. Minimal public squares. Little to no greenery. Too many buildings feel like containers, not communities. Too many cities feel like machines, not ecosystems. In Cape Town, apartheid-era planning still scars the landscape. Highways carve through communities, and vast stretches of land remain inaccessible — physically and economically — to most residents. Spatial segregation persists, reinforced by architecture that isolates rather than connects. In South African townships, it's common to find thousands living in densely packed homes with little access to public parks, playgrounds, or safe communal areas. A child's first experience of public space is often the street corner — unprotected, unplanned and uninspired. Natural light is blocked by overbuilt skylines. Parks, what US landscape architect and journalist Frederick Law Olmsted called the 'lungs of the city', are replaced by parking garages and luxury developments. He once said: 'The enjoyment of scenery employs the mind without fatigue and yet exercises it; tranquilises it and yet enlivens it.' Our built environment should be our balm. Instead, for many, it's a burden. What good is a building if it houses the body but stifles the spirit? What makes a building feel alive? Some of the world's most enduring spaces are not grand because of their materials, but because they anticipate human life. Zumthor's mountain hotel in Switzerland is one such example, where balconies are placed to catch the soft afternoon light and the scent of fruit flan welcomes guests as they return from a long walk. Most traditional Japanese homes are another: flexible, breathable structures that morph with the seasons and the rituals of daily life. The rooms slide open to invite the garden in, and close tight to shield the family from winter's chill. They are meditative in their simplicity, dignified in their intimacy. Closer to home, the Ndebele homestead of South Africa offers a striking embodiment of place and identity. With its boldly painted geometric murals and hand-plastered walls, the Ndebele home doesn't just shelter, it speaks. Its patterns carry history, its colours celebrate ceremony and its architectural language is shaped by the rhythms of the community. It is art, shelter and story woven into one. Likewise, Cape Dutch homesteads, thick-walled and veranda-lined, are crafted with climate, culture and community in mind. They are not simply shelters, but social stages where generations gather. These homes and spaces listen — to people, to time, to land. They don't impose. They adapt. And in doing so, they earn love. Like ageing hands or a well-worn shoe, they carry the wrinkles of presence. They are not just lived in. A radical alternative: architecture with ubuntu In African philosophy, ubuntu means: 'I am because we are.' Applied to architecture, it's a radical shift. It means designing not for generic 'users', but for people — in all their grief, joy, mess, and beauty. Zumthor echoes this when he says: 'A good building must be capable of absorbing the traces of human life and thus of taking on a specific richness.' This is not nostalgia. It's a call for humility. When we design with only budgets and blueprints in mind, we build structures that may be seen — but never felt. In the age of AI and mass production, our duty as architects is clearer than ever: We are not just designers of space, we are custodians of soul. Developers optimise for profit; engineers optimise for function and architects must protect the spirit of the home. Steve Mouzon once said: 'If a building is not loved, it will not last.' I believe that. And I would go further: If a home is not loved, it cannot heal. The architecture worth building My parents dreamed of a home, not because they wanted shelter, but because they longed for a place where love could unfold safely, joyfully, freely. That is still what every human being deserves. A home is not where you live. It is where you are remembered. It is where your laughter lingers after you're gone. It is the warmth your children return to. It is the hug your absence still gives. That, to me, is the architecture worth building. DM
