LACMA not LackMA: Open Idea Competition for a Better Los Angeles County Museum of Art

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is the largest encyclopedic museum west of the Mississippi with 350,000 sf of built interior space in its four core buildings, on 6 acres of land. LACMA is about to enter a major construction project: the four existing buildings on the east campus (the Ahmanson, Hammer, and Arts of the Americas Buildings, and the Bing Center) will be demolished and replaced by one new building. After carefully analyzing publicly available documents about the new building, we believe the design to be deeply flawed and dysfunctional. We are inviting you to submit ideas for an alternative LACMA Building for the Permanent Collections, one that would expand gallery space, rather than shrink it, one that will actually offer a home for the collections as well as all services needed to showcase and care for the collections.  

This idea competition is inviting you to propose ideas that show solutions that are smart, functional, aspirational and exiting. We invite you to formulate ideas in a quick charrette to show alternatives that inspire and show a way forward for a LACMA that is improved and fresh, not reduced and compromised.

There are two basic approaches one could take. Both are welcome. 

A) Working with all or some of the 4 existing buildings

B) Starting from scratch on the site

This is an idea competition organized by The Citizens’ Brigade to Save LACMA. We are not affiliated with LACMA or Museum Associates, which runs LACMA. We believe it is important to publicly display ideas that could truly capture people’s eyes, hearts and minds, in order to reset the museum’s architectural path and keep LACMA intact and thriving as an encyclopedic museum. It is our hope that new designs will showcase the collections in a practical and architecturally stimulating environment that will itself be a work of art, the largest in LACMA’s collection.

The jury will award a total of US $10,000 in prize money to competition winners at jury’s discretion.

Top entries will be published on line and in print.

http://savelacma.org/comp/