Curtains for LACMA
LACMA has started to install curtains in the David Geffen Galleries. They are visible at left in the photo above.
Curtains are a counterintuitive choice for a modern museum, but architect Peter Zumthor used both sheer curtains and leather drapes in his lauded Kolumba Museum, Cologne. In 2022 the National Endowment for the Humanities allocated $500,000 to LACMA for curtain R&D.
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| 2022 rendering of interior with curtains |
This rendering, though old, gives an idea of the view from inside the building. The curtains would filter near-horizontal light around sunrise and sunset.
Critics have compared Zumthor's Wilshire-bridging museum to a freeway overpass. The removal of the steel formwork now allows a proper view of the building's underside. I can't say the freeway comparison is off base. The Wilshire bridge is dark and brutalist, not the ambiance you'd choose for a picnic. That's not to say it's uninteresting. There's even a certain rhyme with Levitated Mass. The Wilshire-level perspective of Zumthor's building fits that title at least as well as Michael Heizer's earthwork does. (Levitated Mass will be visible from gallery level, as shown in the rendering.)
Other renderings have the underpass illuminated by ground-level spotlights. That might change the effect (and yes, some freeway overpasses do the same thing).
Comments
The area above Wilshire Blvd will be reminiscent of a freeway overpass, not the type of setting appealing to many people. If the first floor, instead of being two smaller raised podiums, were more like that found in a typical building, the underpass effect might be less noticeable. Not sure how much of that is due to Govan's preference for a one-story exhibit space. But whether one or two floors, it seems that more square footage could have been inserted north of Wilshire, not south of it.
As for the windows, they'll probably duplicate the nature of the open 3 floors surrounding the atrium in the Ahmanson Gallery before they were sealed off.
I really hope the new building ends up being a big success. But the outcome might turn out compromised, as reality often is.
Oh, jeez Louise. Tell me all the time and money for this project, in the end, will not look worse than some of the worst parts of the New Jersey Turnpike!
As to the curtains, they are NOT a "counterintuitive choice." There are curtains at the New National Gallery, Berlin. That's as modern as it gets.