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Originally Posted by JerellO
The design of LACMA is so underwhelming. It doesn’t even look world-class.. it’s just a 2 story concrete irregular shaped building.... how inspiring and groundbreaking.....
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People said the same thing about Isozaki's MOCA. Now that he won the Pritzker Prize, people are looking again. It was always a great building, but just subtle in the ways that it responded to the challenges of its site.
There's subtlety in the new LACMA too. Zumthor won the Pritzker years ago. It is the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in Architecture. Have some faith that Zumthor knows what he is doing?
There are many great building that do not scream that they are great. Take, for example, the British Art Center at Yale. From the outside, it looks like a concrete box that has metal panels where the windows would be. Or, look at the Salk Institute, another Kahn design whose brilliance is due in part to the most simple geometric gesture of revealing and hiding the solidity of a plane.
Guess who else does that? That is what Zumthor is doing on the first floor of LACMA, a gesture Zumthor makes even more mysterious by enveloping some of the planes in glass. As I said, there's a lot of subtlety in the LACMA design. It is worth a second look.