Renzo Piano’s New Museum
Renzo Piano descends from a proud line of Italian builders but he diverged from his family’s professional lineage, becoming an architect in the age of machinery. When Piano and his collaborator, English architect Richard Rogers, won an international competition to design the Georges Pomidou Centre in Paris in 1971, they became known for their flamboyantly industrial sensibility. They also forged a connection with the international art establishment. After designing the Pompidou, Piano went on to work on a range of art museums and concert halls in Europe and the United States. His most recent masterpiece, The Broad Contemporary Art Museum in Los Angeles, has caused a ripple of controversy in the L.A. art community.
Piano and Rogers shook architectural norms by designing the Pompidou, an inside-out, irreverent commentary on modern technology. Since then, Piano has become less of a boundary-breaking innovator and more of a conservative architecture savant. But only Piano can design a building that still appears bombastic while conservatively tip-toeing around the divergent desires of philanthropist Eli Broad and museum director Michael Govan.
Piano has undoubtedly done a substantial amount of compromising, navigating and redirecting over the past two years. When Eli Broad decided to house his far-reaching collection of contemporary art in a building on the campus of the Los Angeles County Museum (LACMA), architect Rem Koolhaas won the bid for the project. Koolhaas’ plan called for the demolition of LACMA’s existent buildings and would have cost an estimated $300 million. When the funds didn’t surface—Broad and his wife Edythe were willing to donate between $50 and $60 million, but Koolhaas’ design meant that other donors would have to pick up the tab—Broad flew to Europe to meet with Piano. Piano agreed to join the project and they broke ground for the new museum in 2005. Michael Govan became director of LACMA soon after.
Broad, at age 74, is an old-school proponent of patronage who wants to turn LA into an epicenter that rivals Manhattan but Govan has a less staid view of museum culture. ”Walk into the Met, and you have Greek and Roman on your left and ancient Egypt on your right,” Govan said in an interview. ”These are the pillars of our art history because museums as we know them were created as an idea in Europe in the Enlightenment.” Govan isn’t convinced that the Enlightenment is the best model for LA and he may have reluctantly embraced the idea of having an art world savant like Piano redesigning LACMA’s campus.
While Broad wanted to create an architectural bastion that would give LA a more grounded cultural identity, many critics and artists wanted to preserve LA’s non-hierarchical, disjointed landscape. Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for the LA Times, recently suggested that Piano served two masters while designing BCAM. He had to create an attractive and sensational home for Broad’s collection while leaving room for Govan’s inclusive vision. BCAM lacks the innovative spirit of the Pompidou and feels more like a compromise. However, given all the stipulations, Piano produced a commendable building. A sleek, quiet wall of marble faces the street while a complex lattice of scaffolding, stairways, and an escalator, imbues the building with just a bit of Piano’s signature verve.
Constructing BCAM’s 60,000 square feet of gallery space required the demolition of a parking garage and the partial closure of Ogden Avenue, a feat that architect Renzo Piano described as miraculous. “Taking a garage and a street away in Los Angeles, my God, it’s like destroying the Coliseum in Rome,” Piano joked. With its marble façade, its crimson accoutrements, its courtyard and its walkway, BCAM has transformed the LACMA landscape.
A red escalator, called “the spider,” leads to BCAM’s third floor entrance, where the sensory affair begins full-force. The first gallery to the left of the entrance is dedicated to Jasper Johns. After Johns come Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Rucsha and Twombly. Piano’s design works wonders for these artists who came of age in the 60s and 70s. The high ceilings, the steady stream of light and the expansive, rectangular spaces do justice to the work. In the largest third floor gallery, work by Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol and John Baldessari creates a commingling of high culture, low culture, and mass media.
Nothing about Piano’s newest contribution to the international art world challenges exhibition space norms. But Piano’s design is not going to drag the LA art scene into a pit of patriarchic museum culture. In fact, Piano did an admirable job of bridging the gap between authoritative architecture and contemporary art. Michael Govan observed, “In our contemporary world, disciplines have become so specialized. And what you’ll get is the architect over here and the artist over there and my hope is to integrate those in a sensitive way that is more profound. It is about architecture; it is about space; it is about art.”
The LA art world has nothing to fear. BCAM will not constrict its freedom. Piano has designed a building that Govan can view as a uniting gesture and that Broad can view as distinguished. BCAM is an architectural hybrid that does its job well. It functions as both a bridge and a monument and it leaves the LA art world swimming in that strange in-between state of existence that the city treasures.
>Written by d/visible contributor Catherine Wagley.
