Peter Zumthor's proposed redesign for LACMA, facing west. (©Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner)

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam does it. The Louvre does it — twice. The Sackler Museum at Harvard wanted to do it in the 1980s, but neighbors objected and its design was changed.

Bridging a major street, as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art now proposes to do in expanding across Wilshire Boulevard, is not an unprecedented idea for a prominent museum. In truth the gesture by LACMA and its architect, Peter Zumthor, is the product not so much of boldness as a combination of diplomacy and fidelity — perhaps misguided — to certain elements of his original design.

And while L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti and other elected officials were quick to praise the updated version, my feelings about Zumthor's LACMA have grown more complicated. The more I think about the plan's newly attenuated form, stretched like a piece of black bubble gum across Wilshire, the more I wonder if the architect's basic reading of Los Angeles could use an update.

LACMA's director, Michael Govan, has said that among the first calls he made after accepting the job nearly a decade ago was to Zumthor's office in the tiny Swiss mountain town of Haldenstein. As they began working together, Govan and Zumthor took a series of unusual steps to protect the design of a new LACMA from the pressures, political and financial, that so often dilute ambitious architecture....Continue Reading

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