Site visit on Friday – the new LACMA by Renzo Piano. I don’t like it. I remember when the project was presented, there was to compare an aerial view of Los Angeles with the LACMA and a aerial view of Florence, Italy with a area of the same size like the LACMA indicated which covered the city’s center. Piano’s intervention (a new addition with gallery spaces and main entrance in order to reorganize the entire campus) derives from the scale of the Center of Florence. A single piece carefully added to the existing in a way that it resolves a more complex situation by the relation, orientation and defining points towards the surrounding area. An approach you take in a dense, historically grown, constantly changed, modified and extended city pattern. The new part is limited because of space and is based on precise relating in order to find its appropriate expression within the context. But Los Angeles is not Florence. Characteristically of the city the area of LACMA is huge, vast with a number of different buildings dispersed located (i.e. a single museum versus a city center with a wide range of different users). Piano’s interevention seems isolated in this context. The isolation itself is not the problem, it’s typical for Los Angeles. But the nature of the isolation points in the wrong direction. Currently, there is LACMA West at Fairfax and LACMA East, between was the parking and now new addition. LACMA East was the newest part so far, transformed and extended several times. It’s a group of building with all the galleries around an entry courtyard oriented to Wilshire. This entry situation is now shifted back west towards LACMA West where it all started. A new underground parking garage is located on the north side of the new building. The exit leads to a new main entry ticketing pavillion where Odgen St was (the cross street Wilshire/6th between LACMA East and West) and from there the main access continues up to the 3rd floor of the new galleries addition (you’re moving through the building from top to ground level). This new entry situation which should structure the entire museum site is very much focused on the new part. Although the project includes a sort of connecting street as they call it perpendicular to this access from the parking in east-west direction, I don’t see how the existing LACMA East can maintain it’s functionality. It will be completely isolated, as most of the eastern part of the area. The Building at the west end of the present entrance courtyard turns it’s back side to the former parking lot and future main entrance. In this constellation it will be difficult to reintegrate LACMA East within the new situation. Piano creates a spot in this big area, a new focus. I think the focus gets lost in the scale of the area and isn’t able to relate further than locally to the addition. The centrally focused locality is the problem: it relates easily in the density of a city like Florence, but it can’t find the expression in a similar way here. OMA with the wining project of the competition tried to pursue a very different, more radical and I think successful interpretation. Successful because it reflects an idea of Los Angeles: they created a megaroof structure over LACMA East with the new addition, like a tent, and rearranged everything underneath…