The Brooklyn Rail

Los Angeles is a young city whose history perpetually erodes through bastard architecture by political speculators, landlords, and developers who perpetuate the myth of LA as a city without history. LA’s urbanity has shifted through its short life: streetcars, pedestrians, and downtowns stretched by freeways, cars, and Reyner Banham’s postmodern morphology of its four ecologies. As the city fights its way into 250 years of existence, nostalgic, gluttonous, and NIMBY teeth have sunk into a criticism of one of the few public buildings that has made its way into construction, throwing a shroud over our potential to enjoy Architecture.

I always thought LA looked best when driving out towards LAX, raised on the 110 ExpressLanes at the level of the palms, and that its beauty came from the velocity at which the city is perceived, a construct inherited from Denise Scott Brown. Surely a city so focused on building itself for the car would only look good from inside one. Peter Zumthor raising the floor plate to thirty feet above grade reverts this notion. The city holds up without speed.

LA has always been a city of forgeries: stucco, juxtaposition, simultaneity. What do you call a media rustbelt—the demediatization of Los Angeles? The image of the city is constantly broadcast, distorted, mediatized. If the Bonaventure came to represent the LA of the eighties as a self-reflecting, broadcasting maze, impenetrable and inescapable, then Zumthor’s LACMA becomes the symbol of the twenty-first-century city: splintered and raised above its own autoscape, compressed and extended, suspended in clear air. Artists always want to capture LA—Edward Ruscha, Harold Altman, Eve Babitz. As Hollywood is on its last breath, Zumthor is teaching the city how to see itself. Instead of the indoor/outdoor “Selling Sunset” trap, we are dealt an upstairs/downstairs. In the words of William Mulholland: “There it is. Take it.”

Zumthor and Michael Govan’s LACMA is a building that has learnt how to cross Wilshire Boulevard, that has raised the Angeleno to the heights of the only Greek god present on the West Coast: the 405. Elevating the eye from the rubber, the curbs and the wheels allow for the illusion of an unmediated view, reached by two massive staircases. The perimeter is the city, pushing into the space of the museum as an artifact that can be shaped, decided on, perhaps as a city in collapse, a city in its process of artificial reinvention reframed for its uncertain pedestrian future. The city’s prototypical stucco shines brighter next to the rough concrete. The non-façade of uninterrupted fixed glazing captures the edge of the West, not in movement, but static, like film roll against a light box. We are no longer seeing the city through a car window or at twenty four frames per second, but rather, through Zumthor’s own focal point. But as one learns in Los Angeles: one can’t look backwards and drive safely forward.