LACMA eyed as a work of art

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has raised $156 million, enough to bankroll the first round of construction in a three-step project aimed at making the museum bigger and more attractive while transforming its hodgepodge of buildings into a more unified campus that visitors can easily navigate.

Museum officials are expected to announce today a budget of $130 million for a first phase of construction, to begin by year’s end, with completion expected in fall 2007. It includes a new building to house LACMA’s contemporary art collection, a large, glassed-in entrance pavilion with adjoining piazzas, and a covered walkway traversing the campus, providing what the museum’s president and director, Andrea L. Rich, calls a “main street” that will save visitors from having to search to find their way.

Presiding over the unkinking and new construction is Renzo Piano, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect picked by Eli Broad, the billionaire home builder and arts philanthropist who has anted up the $50-million cost of the new 60,000-square-foot Broad Contemporary Art Museum as well as $10 million to buy art.

Los Angeles County is providing $10 million toward phase one construction; the rest of the $156 million, museum officials said, comes from members of LACMA’s board. One trustee is anonymously contributing $25 million.

Piano’s design includes new facades intended to bring visual spark and cohesiveness to the string of museum buildings along Wilshire Boulevard and an injection of his trademark airiness and light into an atrium that Rich considers “sort of a black hole.”

Piano said his aim is to turn LACMA into an environment akin to a small, old-world town, knit by the central walkway. “In a little town, when you walk, every 200 feet you have something surprising -- a piazza, a church.” Among the surprises for LACMA visitors, he said, will be emerging from a new, underground garage into a verdant extension of Hancock Park and an escalator ride rising 70 feet from the crystal-like entrance pavilion to the “vast, generous, open,” loft-like and naturally lighted upper floor of the Broad Museum.

On Wilshire, passersby also will see buildings festooned with new color: Piano said he is leaning toward decorative screens of Teflon that will shimmer in varied “enjoyable” colors to be determined -- not hiding existing buildings but adorning them.

As a practical matter, he said that what’s being created should save visitors from getting lost. “One of the tragedies of the present situation, apart from architectural complication and mess, is that people get confused,” he said.

Criticized for unimaginative, remote and fortress-like architecture when its three-building core opened in 1965, LACMA compounded inelegance with clutter as it grew, adding structures in 1986, 1988 and 1998. Consequently, said Wally Weisman, chairman of LACMA’s board, some collectors who might have been expected to donate prized works have regarded the museum as a less than ideal showplace. Now LACMA will have the shine to compete, Weisman said: “I think this is going to attract the kind of support from [art donors] in Southern California that it historically hasn’t had.”

LACMA’s hopes seemed dashed in December 2002, when trustees gave up trying to fund a bold plan to raze most of the museum and re-create it as a single building topped by an undulating, tent-like roof. But after they adopted a more conservative and gradualist tack -- and the economy improved -- the donations came in.

Because fundraising has gone better than anticipated over the past year, Rich said, LACMA will be able to accomplish some work leaders thought would have to wait: demolishing an above-ground parking structure and replacing it with the underground garage.

LACMA’s fundraising benefited from a far more favorable economy than the museum faced when it was trying to push its Plan A: the big-tent vision of architect Rem Koolhaas, whose daring, tear-it-all-down approach was chosen in a competition during 2001 and figured to cost up to $300 million.

The incremental strategy also helped, Rich said: The Koolhaas design “was exciting and got people pumped up, but it was really quite risky” because the money needed to be raised upfront, and LACMA and its collection of about 100,000 art objects would have been largely homeless during construction, raising the question of how the museum would sustain public interest through a long closure.

“The beauty of this is we’re not disrupting anything,” Broad said. “At least 95% of the public space will stay open while this is going on.”

Taking advantage of low interest rates, LACMA trustees floated $150 million in tax-exempt bonds last year, to be paid back over 30 years. The interest LACMA must pay can fluctuate, Weisman said; it’s currently 2.8% with a ceiling of less than 4%. The borrowed “nut” will pay for design and construction, while money donated for the project will be invested, presumably earning more over time than LACMA will pay out in interest on construction loans.

LACMA officials said they don’t know how much the three-step process will cost or when it will be finished. The second phase will be devoted to interior remodeling and reorganizing the collection: Each of the museum’s four categories, European art, Asian art, art of the Americas and contemporary art, will have its own building instead of being parceled in different structures.

The third phase, which Broad guesses could cost about $70 million, calls for an overhaul of the 250,000-square-foot LACMA West building, formerly a May Co. department store built in 1939. It now houses the children’s gallery, a special exhibitions hall and a penthouse for meetings and receptions.

Plans call for adding another special exhibitions space, galleries to house collections of costumes and textiles, photographs, prints and drawings, and establishing a center for new, technologically driven art forms. The museum’s offices and library also would be moved into the West building.

To help cover increased operating costs, LACMA aims concurrently to raise $100 million for its endowment -- doubling the amount it has now.

After a successful year of fundraising for the project’s first phase, museum leaders are determined not to let up, Weisman said. “Quite the contrary. We’ll be reaching out to the community.”