Like a concrete aircraft carrier: Was Los Angeles’ giant new $724 million Expo really worth all the carbon emissions? | Build

DWalking along the palm-tree-lined strip of Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, a stunning new crossing appears on the horizon. A ribbon of glass leaps over the road, sandwiched between two giant floors of concrete. As you get closer, the bridge bulges out in sinuous arcs, snapping in on itself to carve a shape-shifting amoeboid dot, spreading like an inkblot. From some angles, it has a retro-futuristic atmosphere, reminiscent of a Jetsons airport terminal, or one of those “Googie”-style gas stations in California. The curved roof, on the other hand, looks like a great big tongue, widening out to give the neighbors a rough lick.

This concrete giant is home to the new David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), a $724 million mothership designed by legendary Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. It’s less a museum than a massive piece of infrastructure, a 110,000-square-foot warehouse and bridge, rising nine meters into the air and looming over the street with muscular heft. Two decades in the making, subject to years of delays, disputes and escalating costs – building on a tar swamp in an earthquake zone is no easy feat – it will finally open this weekend.

Fitzgeraldian’s achievement is the brainchild of Michael Govan, who became Lacma’s director in 2006 with an ambition to build a museum like no other, using the promise of a dazzling structure to attract donations of artwork and dollars ($125 million came from Los Angeles County, the rest was raised). Jovan cut his teeth at the Guggenheim Museum, and at Frank Gehry’s Bilbao outpost, where he clearly got a taste for the transformative fairy dust of iconic architecture. He later moved to Dia:Beacon, in New York’s Hudson Valley, where he commissioned Zumthor for a project that ultimately did not materialize. In Lacma, he was determined to create a monument for posterity at any cost.

“My brief to the architect was for everything to be on one floor,” says Govan. “I wanted transparency, no hierarchy, no facade.” He stands in the towering hallway, surrounded by an open field of disparate objects, surrounded by concrete overhead, polished concrete underfoot, and concrete-walled rooms all around us. “I also ordered concrete,” he adds. “People say concrete is not the most environmentally friendly medium, but if it lasts 500 years it is very friendly!” He laughs with a winning smile, displaying the easy charisma of someone accustomed to extracting large sums of money from billionaires.

Eschewing the usual design competition, Govan went straight to Zumthor, architecture’s most revered liquid stone sculptor. The 82-year-old Pritzker Prize-winning recluse has transformed a humble mixture of cement and sand into everything from a charming charred chapel in a field in Germany — made by pouring it over a pyramid pyre, before its wooden innards are ignited — to a cave-like holiday home in Devon, built by ramming crumbled concrete into sedimentary layers. But Zumthor’s little mountain trigger has never done anything as big as the Lakma. Although he had help from SOM’s executive architects, it was like asking a boat builder to build an aircraft carrier.

In some ways, it shows. Arriving at Lacma’s park-like campus—which, unfortunately, is separated from the sidewalk by a steel fence—visitors are greeted by a barren concrete plaza. They are taken up a long outdoor staircase, or into an elevator, housed in one of eight wings that hold up the building, like the chunky legs of a concrete elephant. This public space currently appears to be loitering under a highway overpass, but there is hope that it will be activated by crowds of tourists and events. A touch of public life in Los Angeles is brought to life on one leg by a branch of Erewhon, an upscale grocery store synonymous with bougie, known for its $20 smoothies. Jovan promises there’s a “special Lakma blend” in the works – perhaps a mix of concrete-colored charcoal with black sesame granola?

Once you’re done going upstairs, things get better. Wandering through the galleries, which vary in size, mood and colour, is fun. Some are small, chapel-like spaces, dedicated to a single element – ​​such as a Qing dynasty court robe, dramatically illuminated against the dark blue walls. Others are larger and feature period furniture and artwork mounted on the walls stained a rusty red, like Corten steel. Sometimes moody theatrics get too much. It might be fine for a mountain spa, like Zumthor’s famous Therme Vals, but with all the dark walls and dim lighting, there’s a tendency for the galleries to feel a bit sepulchral, ​​or a mysterious columbarium of 6,000 years of dead things.

Between the concrete tombs, sunny comfort is brought about by the panoramic views outside, to the green garden and the busy street, veiled by sparkling venetian blinds. It’s a pleasure to sit and watch the world go by from such an elevated vantage point, and Bruce Goff’s eccentric pavilion of Japanese art has never looked so good next to all the gray concrete. The curtains, designed by textile designer Reiko Sudo, help filter the Los Angeles sunlight and create an unusual, homely atmosphere.

Combined with the comfortable leather seating, the curtains can make you feel as if you’re exploring an art collector’s massive villa in the Hollywood Hills. There are distinct echoes of John Lautner’s mid-century homes in the curved concrete slabs and seamless expanses of glass, and you sense that Zumthor’s primary ambition was to build a large-scale case study house. The whole place rises high, safely secluded behind a tall fence, and exudes an exclusive compound vibe (a feeling amplified in the gift shop, where $150 tote bags, made of shiny drapery fabric, are displayed alongside $215 Lacma-branded jackets.

Govan has been criticized for his decision to abandon the usual chronological commentary in favor of thematic collections, but for the most part he succeeds. One moment you’re marveling at Do Ho Suh’s re-creation of a palace in Seoul, the next you’re encountering Hindu deities and Islamic textiles, or a room talking about plastic in art. In a way, it feels like Los Angeles, where Koreatown jostles with Little Armenia, Historic Philippine City, Little Ethiopia, and Tehrangeles in a sprawling, endless suburb.

The open areas between the rooms also provide good day-lit exhibition spaces, including one area appropriately dedicated to car culture. You can admire the fiberglass body of Raymond Lowe’s sleek 1961 Studebaker Avanti, while looking at its bloated, gas-guzzling descendants roaring along the Wilshire below. Zumthor says he wanted to make the visitor experience “feel like you’re walking through a forest,” with open spaces and sheltered trellises — which can be disorienting, just like a forest. I found myself making circles around the concrete maze to make sure I saw everything. It may be a good idea to bring a ball of wool.

Back in the gift shop, there is a poignant reminder of what once stood here. $5 postcard of Ed Ruscha’s painting, Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Flames, 1965-68, depicting the original complex that was razed to make way for Zumthor’s Goliath. Designed in the 1960s by William Pereira, the architect of the space-age-themed building at Los Angeles International Airport, and later expanded, it was a fascinating hodgepodge, but one that Govan claims is beyond repair. “People called it ‘Lekma,’” he says. “I had a lot of people who wouldn’t donate their collections to the old buildings, because they were in such bad shape.” It is believed that sponsors were not so keen on lavishing their generosity on a renovation project (philanthropy must catch up).

Zumthor’s bold building may have brought in the collections and the money, but it comes at an undisclosed cost. Getting the whole thing off the ground and extending the road – a piece of structural theater more than just necessity – required 15,000 tons of rebar, twice the amount of metal in the entire Eiffel Tower. The concrete bill is equally impressive to the eye. For every square meter of floor space in a Zumthor building, there are two cubic meters of solid concrete supporting it – compared to an average of 0.3 to 0.6 cubic meters for a typical large concrete building. In all, 65,000 cubic meters of concrete were poured, nearly twice the amount for the Sixth Street Bridge in Los Angeles, a massive bridge spanning more than a kilometer across roads, railways and river. The carbon footprint is probably appropriate, given the person’s name on the building. In a 2021 ranking by The Conversation, the project’s main donor, David Geffen, was listed as the most polluting American individual, due to his use of yachts and private jets.

I posed the carbon question to Zumthor. Does the end justify the means? Was it worth the extraordinary environmental impact of creating this bold structure, which ultimately has less gallery space than the buildings it replaces? “The ‘concrete uses too much carbon’ horizon is too small,” he says in a growling voice. “This building will still be there when people talk about other things.”

The window behind him overlooks the La Brea Tar Pits, an archaeological research park where fossils of Ice Age animals have been discovered, preserved in bubbling pools of tar. Below the burning concrete cantilever in Zumthor, a model of a woolly mammoth sinks in a lake of crude oil, as a mother and child look on helplessly.