{"id":834439,"date":"2026-07-29T20:44:12","date_gmt":"2026-07-29T20:44:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/834439\/"},"modified":"2026-07-29T20:44:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-29T20:44:12","slug":"the-hollow-egalitarianism-of-las-revamped-art-museum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/834439\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hollow Egalitarianism of LA’s Revamped Art Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Zumthor, the architect of the controversial new Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), wants to make one thing very clear<\/a>: that \u201cthis building never looks down on you.\u201d His sentiments<\/a> are vaguely populist: the building \u201cshould be open to the people.\u201d It\u2019s a building type, he says<\/a>, that \u201ctreats everybody equal\u201d and \u201clets you have your opinion. Follow your own path.\u201d Michael Govan, the equally controversial museum director who has steered this project since its inception in 2006, mirrors<\/a> the architect\u2019s vision: \u201cYou make your own path, you decide\u201d where to go. The gallery guide is called \u201cWander<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The former building, designed in 1965 by William Pereira, arranged works along chronological, geographic, and cultural lines, creating a multifloor, \u201chierarchical\u201d structure. The new museum is organized across a single level elevated thirty feet in the air around four major bodies of water: the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans, and the Mediterranean Sea. The 347,500-square-foot structure made of raw, unpigmented, board-formed concrete contains 110,000 square feet of display space and exhibits about 2,500 pieces of ancient and modern art, mixing new and old, high and low, East and West, and everything in between. At a cost of $720 million (and rising), the design was funded with a mix of sources from Los Angeles County and a few ultrawealthy megadonors.<\/p>\n

If there is one point that is stressed in every press release and architectural statement, it\u2019s the idea<\/a> that the \u201cbuilding de-emphasizes structural hierarchies.\u201d One story tall, it has no high or low, no front or back. Govan speaks of a \u201cmingling of objects and influences ever on the move,\u201d a space<\/a> \u201cwhere you have inherently baked in it these areas of crossings, connections, diasporas.\u201d He describes<\/a> his vision as creating \u201can equitable organization of cultures, equally accessible\u201d to all. A New Yorker puff piece makes the design\u2019s basic aim explicit: \u201cThe idea was to abolish the hierarchies inherent in the old museums, which offered prime real estate to European painting and shunted other cultures and their artifacts aside.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since its unveiling in 2013, the building has received an inordinate amount of criticism, some of it deserved, some not. The core concerns focus on a few areas including reduced gallery capacity (11,000 fewer square feet of exhibition space), less flexible spaces (the galleries are fixed), disorienting navigation with minimal labeling, lack of public input in the process, and massive cost. No doubt these are significant issues, but they don\u2019t address what I take to be the most glaring problem: a romantic fantasy of the laborer as craftsman, one that bears no resemblance to the lived reality of workers today.<\/p>\n

Zumthor and museum management defend the price tag by pointing to the fact that the building is intended to last forever. Zumthor took his cue from the \u201cprimordial quality of the tar pits\u201d adjacent to the site. The concrete structure \u201cshould look old, excavated rather than superimposed\u00a0\u2014 something that \u2018feels like it was there forever and should be there forever.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

As Zumthor sees it<\/a>, the problem with most architecture is its \u201cslickness\u201d\u00a0\u2014 his catchall term for the consumerist worldview he despises\u00a0\u2014 and he fashions himself by contrast as a simple artisan. As a critique of capitalism, \u201cslick\u201d is empty; it is about as sophisticated as thinking the problem with rich people is their McMansions. Zumthor sees the building as a challenge to the slickness that Los Angeles embodies. He is on record describing the city with a world-class clich\u00e9: \u201cgreen lawns and bushes in the front yards of the houses look as if they were made of plastic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rather than a manufacturer of glossy cubes, Zumthor offers himself as a simple laborer, a common man of the people. \u201cThe German word Baumeister,\u201d he says<\/a>, \u201cis a beautiful word. When you call me a Baumeister, it will make me happy.\u201d He is a simple craftsman \u201cwithout a diploma.\u201d He \u201ctrusts non-architects more than he trusts architects.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet it is hard to imagine a more abstracted fantasy of labor than Zumthor\u2019s. He speaks of the objects in the museum as displaced peoples, as objects that \u201cspeak,\u201d if only we had ears to listen. Zumthor shows remarkable contempt for educators. Our ears are blocked<\/a> up with the voices of \u201cschoolteachers pinning everything down.\u201d He hopes \u201cthere won\u2019t be any tags\u201d placed on the works by these repressive schoolteachers. So far, he has succeeded: his walls are stripped clean of nearly all information.<\/p>\n

His antidote to the schoolteachers and the slicksters is an army of (partially undocumented) laborers, whom he fantasizes as simple artisans plying their trade. From the beginning, he \u201cimagined Mexican workers doing the ground\u201d of the museum (a concrete artwork entitled Feathered Ground), \u201csomething done by hand. Indigenous knowledge, people who have been there for a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Obviously Zumthor does not mean these workers have lived for a \u201clong time\u201d in the area but rather that they carry in their blood an attachment to ancient soil\u00a0\u2014 that their indigenous experience can give the \u201chomeless\u201d objects their voices back. The objects in LACMA\u2019s collection were deracinated, Zumthor explains, cut loose from their contexts and histories. \u201cI think this could be my task, to create a new home, a temporary home for these homeless pieces,\u201d he concludes.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, his concern<\/a> is not about such crass material things as wages, labor practices, or worker protections but rather with \u201chow labor is hidden.\u201d How these indigenous workers can show Americans \u201crespect for tools, for work.\u201d His aesthetic attraction to cracks\u00a0\u2014 evident throughout the museum\u00a0\u2014 is an expression of his desire to express labor rather than \u201cconceal it.\u201d Zumthor imagines that \u201crevealing\u201d labor rather than \u201cconcealing\u201d it serves some unspecified political purpose.<\/p>\n

Zumthor belongs to a long tradition that treats architecture as a critique of hierarchy and an embrace of the spiritual ideal of the laborer. Walter Gropius, in his famous 1919 Bauhaus Program, announced<\/a> his desire to \u201ccreate a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist!\u201d<\/p>\n

For the Bauhaus generation, breaking down the walls between classes was the highest form of political achievement. Its architects were inspired by the infamous utopian writer and romantic antiauthoritarian Paul Scheerbart, who fantasized a world where \u201ckings walk with beggarmen, artisans walk with men of learning.\u201d For Scheerbart, the craftsman had no interest in the debased socialist ideal of improved conditions. \u201cNew social welfare organizations, hospitals, inventions, or technical innovations and improvements,\u201d Scheerbart proclaimed, will not \u201cbring new culture\u201d\u00a0\u2014 only a new architecture could. Neither Scheerbart nor Gropius had any interest in ridding the world of either beggars or kings, only in fostering mutual respect between them and, by the same stroke, naturalizing their class positions.<\/p>\n

Scheerbart\u2019s anti-hierarchical program shaped a range of influential practices including Bruno Taut\u2019s The City Crown of 1920. Taut\u2019s \u201cnon-political socialism\u201d sought to \u201cbridge every gap between fighting classes.\u201d Taut sought \u201ca better future, in which man will stand with mankind\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0without the barriers of the classes.\u201d Like Zumthor, Taut regarded \u201ccomfort\u201d (his version of \u201cslickness\u201d) as capitalism\u2019s overarching vice. \u201cGood Living, Education\u00a0\u2014 knife and fork, railways and bathrooms, what do those bring us?\u201d he wondered. Nothing but \u201cguns, bombs, instruments for killing!\u201d<\/p>\n

The problem was not that the world was full of rich and poor, capitalists and laborers, but how these groups saw each other. His aim was to preserve those differences while ridding the world of the \u201carrogant\u201d boundaries between them.<\/p>\n

Erich Baron, another \u201csocialist\u201d writing in The City Crown, saw all the people of earth united in their \u201csuffering,\u201d including \u201cemperor, king, gentleman, peasant, burgher, and beggar.\u201d It went without saying that \u201ccultural progress\u201d could not \u201cbe measured by how the poor climb into higher classes.\u201d Here the architects were in harmony with contemporary fascist economists, who, alongside Baron, insisted that \u201cthe notable increase of wages was not accompanied by greater civilization.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Peter Zumthor, the architect of the controversial new Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), wants to make…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":834440,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-834439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/834439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=834439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/834439\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/834440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=834439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=834439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=834439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}