Many nights last fall, Peter Zumthor, the Swiss architect, lay awake wondering, Is Michael Govan my friend? Govan is the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Soon after he was hired, in 2006, he invited Zumthor to propose a plan to transform its sprawling campus. “He called me and said, ‘Listen, I’m about to take a new position in Los Angeles. I need an architect,’ ” Zumthor told me. “He said, ‘I don’t believe in competitions. And I would like to work with you out of public view.’ ” The pitch was irresistible, Zumthor said: “A new museum, completely new. Who wouldn’t say yes?”
Zumthor is seventy-seven, and oversees a thriving boutique architecture practice, with three dozen employees and projects on three continents. Though he has never built in the United States, he is known throughout Europe as the creator of exquisitely stern structures with jewel-box proportions; in 2009, he won the Pritzker Prize. LACMA belongs to a vast public—the ten million people of Los Angeles County—and sees a million visitors each year. It shares a park with the La Brea Tar Pits paleontological site, and occupies a position at the midway point between downtown and the coast. Because of the building’s prominence, scale, and cost—some six hundred and fifty million dollars—Zumthor’s LACMA is poised to be the most significant architectural addition to Los Angeles since Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall opened, two decades ago.
The new building, as Zumthor conceives it, is an elevated, single-story structure loosely shaped like a Matisse cutout. In various iterations, as he has recast its form, critics have likened it to an inkblot, a blob, a minor-city airport terminal, Bullwinkle’s antler, and an Italian Autogrill. The actor Brad Pitt has publicly defended Zumthor’s designs as emanating “from the soul for the soul,” but the building has caused an uproar that reaches beyond aesthetic concerns. In May, Christopher Knight, the art critic for the Los Angeles Times, won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of pieces decrying it as a betrayal—a museum that would undermine the collection it was meant to house. Govan, protective of Zumthor’s process, does not share bad press, and Zumthor doesn’t ask.
Govan likes to work with artists on long-term, moon-shot projects—James Turrell’s Roden Crater, Michael Heizer’s “City.” Making a major building with Zumthor was a similar proposition. His body of work is idiosyncratic, even peculiar: a memorial on the Barents Sea to people burned at the stake during Norway’s seventeenth-century witch trials; a museum, also in Norway, commemorating an obsolete zinc mine; a thermal spa in the Alps. He has built two small and highly specific art museums: a Kunsthaus in Bregenz, Austria, often given over to the work of a single artist, and a museum for religious artifacts that emerges from the ruins of a bombed-out Catholic church in Cologne.
An emotional, intuitive designer, Zumthor draws on the sensory memories of a mid-century European boyhood—the hexagonal tiles in his aunt’s kitchen, the way light fell on the forest floor. He often begins his designs with impressionistic pastel sketches, and spends years pondering models constructed with the actual materials, watching the effects of light on the world’s most expensive doll houses. He is known to handcraft his buildings, slowly, but the deliberate pace didn’t concern Govan. “I knew that the longer he had the better the building would be,” he told me. “Some artists add complexity with time. He carves away, till you’re left with a distilled thing.” In any case, Govan added, “I needed a decade to raise money.”
After fourteen years of planning and debate, construction is set to begin this fall. Zumthor, who despises monuments, finds himself responsible for a building intended to anchor a diffuse and sporadically planned city, where the forests catch fire every fall. A year ago, when I visited him in Haldenstein, an ancient village in the low Alps where he lives and has his atelier, it seemed to him as if the project might, at the final moment, fail, and ruin his good name. He was despondent, familiarly so. “Maybe it happens, maybe it won’t,” he told me. “I always get burned.”
Zumthor’s front door is made of heavy oak; its handle, which resembles an oversized metal staple, is wrapped in a cord of stained umber leather, like a riding crop. A similar one greets visitors at Kolumba, the museum in Cologne. Handles are a minor fetish for him—the point of contact, where a person holds on to a building. (Major fetishes: shadows, rubble and the presence of the past, dancing, his troublesome backhand.) I found Zumthor in his sitting room, brooding in a pool of lamplight, sipping Riesling. He is tall and white-haired, with an open face and an attitude of canny befuddlement—“a little Swiss boy from the Alps,” he says. The floor was covered by an abstract carpet in cobalt blue and oxblood red: a reference to a house that he had designed for Tobey Maguire and Jennifer Meyer but never built. “He got a divorce and the house was lost,” Zumthor told me. “I was happy. It was becoming painful. He doesn’t know, but the floor plan became my beautiful Persian carpet.”
Two weeks earlier, Zumthor had proposed yet another tweak to the LACMA building’s shape. “It was not so big a change, but they freaked out,” he said, as we sat down to eat risotto, prepared by his cook, in a kitchen nook panelled with tigerwood. The horizontal stripes in the wood, he explained, were created by stress from the wind. This wasn’t a fact he had read but, rather, like many things he knows, something he sensed and believed firmly.
“They all panicked, said it’s too late,” he told me, ruefully. The museum’s corporate officers were indignant. The county had allotted a hundred and twenty-five million dollars of taxpayer money; materials were being procured. Plans needed to be submitted the following month, or the building might have to be completely overhauled, to conform with changing building codes. Each week of delay could cost eight hundred thousand dollars.
Zumthor’s thoughts, though, were not about time or expense. They were about posterity. “How can I deliver this building of which I know there’s a better version?” he said. “But Michael, my friend, tells me, ‘You cannot implement these changes.’ ” Govan had written to say that if Zumthor wanted the revisions he would need to find the money—three million dollars—himself. “In a seven-hundred-million-dollar building, I’m now obliged, after all of this, I am to find these three million dollars, me personally. I want to say, ‘Listen, guys, this is your God-damned museum!’ ” He went on, “Everyone is playing me. I’m the only straight guy there—the straight guy from the Swiss Alps.”
Zumthor prefers to work like an omakase sushi chef: trust him completely or go elsewhere. Over dinner, he told me the story of a chapel he had designed to commemorate Bruder Klaus, the farming saint of Switzerland. It started when Hermann-Josef Scheidtweiler, a pious German farmer, read about Kolumba and wrote Zumthor a letter, asking him to make a chapel in his wheat field. Zumthor told me that he replied, “Dear Mr. Scheidtweiler, I have to tell you, I only do contemporary architecture, first, and, second, this is such a tiny commission that my salary would be way too high for you.” In a postscript, he added that Bruder Klaus had been his mother’s favorite saint. “He responded to this P.S.,” Zumthor said, smiling. He admires stubbornness.
Zumthor had an avant-garde idea for the chapel: a narrow tower, with a cavelike interior. So that the farmer could not object, he insisted on working for free. With the help of Scheidtweiler’s farmhands and children, Zumthor constructed a pine-log wigwam with a tunnel leading to an inner chamber. They mixed concrete using sand and stones collected nearby and layered it on in hand-tamped strata, forming a five-sided tower. Then they slowly burned the wigwam away, curing the inside. In the ceiling, a tear-shaped oculus opens to the sky, allowing rain to pool on the lead floor; the smell of smoke lingers in the close interior.
The chapel, where the Scheidtweilers light candles every morning, has become a destination for international architecture buffs. Many of Zumthor’s buildings have. Still, success on a prominent commission in the United States would break him out of his niche, establishing him among the major architects of his generation. In spite of the pitfalls of massive, expensive public works, he was determined to make LACMA a masterpiece. At dinner, he softly sang, “Ma l’America è lontana . . .,”—“but America is far away,” a line from a pop ballad of his youth. “You can feel I am alone, with very few people supporting me,” he said. “I don’t have the right education, or I refuse to have the right education.”
A few days later, on the way to Basel, where he is designing a building for the Beyeler Foundation, he was still agonizing. “I’m asking myself, Why am I so God-damned nervous? And I found out it’s that, it’s a trauma. That’s the trauma from Berlin,” he said. In the early nineties, he won a government competition to design a museum for the Topography of Terror Foundation, on the site where the S.S. had its headquarters and the Gestapo tortured prisoners. Zumthor found himself pinned between the demands of his vision and the realities of a public project. The client, he says, wanted a neutral building, which would not disturb visitors. In his design—three towers connected by a vast hall—he planned to feature the torture chambers at the entrance.
During the project’s decade-long gestation, costs escalated dramatically. The towers were built, but then, after two contractors went bankrupt, the government withdrew support. Zumthor, enraged and humiliated, filed a complaint against the city, claiming that his rights had been violated. “People started to believe I’m doing buildings that cannot be constructed,” he said. He lost in court, and the towers were destroyed. Zumthor believes it would have been his best work.
In Basel, we ate dinner with his daughter, Anna, a psychologist, at a swanky Italian restaurant on the Rhine. He ordered an Old-Fashioned and put it to her directly: “Do you think the Berlin experience has traumatized me?”
Anna studied him. She has blond hair, cut asymmetrically, and wore a cobalt-blue shirt. “No,” she said. “You’re a good example of post-traumatic growth.” In 2004, she had accompanied her father to the site one last time before the towers came down. At dinner, she said that in footage of that visit “you can see the exact moment when you realize this is a stillbirth. You’re brokenhearted. You were misunderstood, blackmailed, your reputation was murdered.”
“Two weeks ago, when Michael Govan wrote me that I cannot implement the changes I want, I’m worried, getting no sleep,” Zumthor said. “Will he sacrifice the building?”
Anna reassured him that Govan was an ally. Slowly, Zumthor said, “He’s a getter. He makes things happen, and he’s smiling. This was the first time he said this is the limit. Like when you realize your parents are not gods.”
He said the only consideration ever in his mind was whether he could put his name to a building. But he had come to seem like a purist, even an ascetic—out of touch, in his Alpine retreat. “How does this come to the mountain hermit, the monastic creature?” he lamented. “I only do what I like.”
The first major public art museum in the city of Los Angeles, LACMA separated from the old museum of history, science, and art, and opened its own campus in 1965, next to the tar pits, in the shopping district known as Miracle Mile. The land belonged to the county, as did the buildings, for which the museum’s board had raised the money.
Howard Ahmanson, a savings-and-loan magnate and the leading donor in the building campaign, had wanted Edward Durell Stone to design it; Norton Simon, another influential donor, wanted Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. They settled on William Pereira, who had built the headquarters for Hunt Foods, which Simon owned. Pereira was an affable, attractive pleaser, who started out designing movie theatres and went on to work in the studio system as a production designer and a producer. (He won an Oscar for special effects in 1943.) During his career, he contributed to dozens of iconic buildings, including the spaceship-like Theme Building, at LAX, which helped to define mid-century Los Angeles. A critic in San Francisco, where Pereira designed the Transamerica Pyramid, dismissed him as “Hollywood’s idea of an architect,” a likable lightweight. At LACMA, he was, indelibly, the second choice.
Pereira designed three buildings, in a U shape, open to Wilshire Boulevard: the Ahmanson, for the permanent collection, a pavilion for special exhibitions, and a six-hundred-seat theatre. Fluted columns decorated their exteriors, which, in a deferential allusion to the design of Ahmanson’s banks, were faced with marble chips. The buildings hovered over large reflecting pools, fed by arcing fountains. Oil from the tar pits often leached in, tinting the water a smudgy black. On opening night, the pools were dyed blood-red, a portent of critical carnage to come.
Arts & Architecture pronounced the LACMA buildings “theatrical rather than dramatic, pitiful rather than sad.” Like a film set, they looked good in pictures but felt too flimsy for sustained, real-world use. The lighting was terrible; the staircases were narrow and seemed likely to buckle in a crowd. After a year, the museum’s first director resigned, maddened by the buildings’ inadequacy.
It was partly LACMA’s burden to validate the city’s stature. Was Los Angeles a place of culture and substance, or was it not? LACMA aspired to be an encyclopedic museum, akin to the Metropolitan Museum of Art: a temple filled with treasures from various cultures and historical periods. Its holdings, bolstered by a trove of objects donated by William Randolph Hearst, swelled over the decades; there are now some hundred and forty thousand items, ranging from Rubens paintings to ancient Indian ritual sculpture and nineteen-forties California coffeepots. The site itself grew to include the Art of the Americas, a postmodern building added in the eighties, and the Pavilion for Japanese Art, a kitschy, beloved folly by Bruce Goff. But the Pereira buildings were neglected. With plumbing problems and long-deferred seismic upgrades, they were trapped in a narrative of imminent collapse. “The employees’ nickname for it is LEAKMA,” Govan told me. “We removed pictures from the walls of the Ahmanson whenever it rained.” Zev Yaroslavsky, who represented Miracle Mile on the County Board of Supervisors until 2014, told me, “There were buckets in the basement. The campus didn’t flow well. It was time to replace it.”
Govan’s mandate was to solve the problematic site. “I literally came to LACMA to tear the whole thing down,” he told me. At the Guggenheim, early in his career, he helped facilitate the museum’s expansion to Bilbao, working closely with Frank Gehry; later, as the head of the Dia Art Foundation, he masterminded its development of a former Nabisco factory in Beacon, New York. Govan is eloquent and appealing, with a reputation for finesse—at ease with both single-minded architects and reluctant donors. At LACMA, he quickly won the support of the Board of Supervisors. Yaroslavsky told me, “I don’t want to say I fell in love with Michael, but I was totally swept off my feet by his ideas, enthusiasm, optimism, intellect, his can-do attitude.”
Govan’s predecessor had spent years on a competition for a master plan. The winning design, by Rem Koolhaas, proposed razing the Pereira buildings and the Art of the Americas to their foundations and unifying the remains under a single roof, like a lid over a dinner pot you don’t want to look at till morning. The museum would have to close for several years during construction—a deeply unpopular idea. Between that and the fact that fund-raising was launched in the midst of the 2001 economic downturn, donations were tepid, and the plan was abandoned. “The environment simply went to hell,” the museum’s then chair told the L.A. Times.
Govan chose not to hold another competition. “It gets dangerous if you fail,” he told me. In order to raise the money that a new building would require—an unprecedented amount in Los Angeles, where cultural philanthropy doesn’t confer the social rewards that it does elsewhere—he needed to offer something dazzling: a forever building, with a motivating story to accompany it. “It had to be a compelling concept, because we were going to have to raise money the likes of which we had never seen,” he told me. “The Rem failure was five years old. That was the strong thing in my mind—the last thing got killed. How do you get one through?”
Zumthor is a cabinetmaker by training; he taught himself architecture in an act of rebellion. His father, an overbearing furniture-maker, expected his son to join him in crafting bedroom sets for middle-class couples. The family history is the root of Zumthor’s confidence—he knows how to make things by hand—and his defensiveness. He gives lectures with titles like “Why Do I Know What I Know?,” as if still trying to make sense of it himself.
Zumthor grew up in Oberwil, the “upper village,” on the outskirts of Basel. He was the eldest of eight. The birth of a sister, when he was seven, allowed his parents to take advantage of a government program that subsidized land for families with four children. On weekends, Zumthor went with his father to dig in unyielding clay, making the foundation of their future home.
His father, he felt, was constantly putting him in humiliating situations: So you think you’re an architect? Let’s see you design a building. When he was nineteen, his father insisted that he draw an addition for the house, the awkward result of which confronts him every time he visits the family home. “The house was destroyed by this annex,” Zumthor told me. “Twenty years later, I was still dreaming about a house which never gets finished.”
For an unhappy period, Zumthor was his father’s apprentice, learning to make cabinets and furniture. The experience was so stressful that, when it came time to be certified, he nearly failed his practical exams. Seeking escape, Zumthor attended art school in Basel, and then applied to Pratt, in New York City. For a blissful stretch in the late sixties, he studied there, and steeped himself in the counterculture. A young photographer picked him up with the line “You look alienated,” and became his girlfriend. An interior-design professor mocked his projects as “cuckoo clocks”—neatly built Swiss clichés—but he found a circle of Bauhaus-connected expatriates who excited him. Then his father, who spoke no English, showed up in New York and said he would not pay for more schooling, and Zumthor returned to Switzerland, bringing along his American girlfriend. His father died at fifty-nine, in a mountaineering accident in the Alps. “I didn’t have time to forgive him,” Zumthor told me. “I was crying, ‘You idiot, you stupid idiot. How did you torture me, and now you’re dead?’ ”
Zumthor went to Chur—“vacation country,” he calls it, in the same canton as St. Moritz—and found work in the regional office of historic preservation. In the job, he scoured the Alps for pre-twentieth-century farmhouses and advised the owners on how to renovate with sensitivity. To appease their Catholic parents and a law forbidding cohabitation, Zumthor and his girlfriend married, but, as he recalls it, she soon got bored with farmhouses and left for Zurich. After they separated, Zumthor met Annalisa, a schoolteacher for special-needs children who spoke the local language, Romansh, and knew how to swing a scythe for haymaking. He can still describe the leather coat she was wearing when he first caught sight of her.
In the early seventies, the couple moved to Haldenstein, sharing a house communally with another couple. The villagers were scandalized—by male ponytails, and by the unconventional life style. At night, Zumthor told me, the postmaster would lie on his belly on a hillock, binoculars trained on the Zumthor house, hoping for a glimpse of a naked woman, or at least something he could report. “Growing up, we were ‘the others,’ ” Anna, Zumthor’s daughter, told me. (She has two younger brothers, Peter and Jon.) “My parents didn’t come from there, which was very bad. Also, we had so much freedom. Everyone had curfews. We did not.”
In his late thirties, Zumthor entered and won a competition to design an elementary school near Chur. The school, his first architecture project, was completed when he was forty. Others came slowly. “I had to fight my way without a diploma,” Zumthor told me. “This was actually wonderful. Nobody was like me, without a diploma.” In Haldenstein, he bought another house and transformed it into an atelier, a modernist take on a nineteenth-century farmhouse, with vertical larchwood slats that over time turned the soft, splintered gray of a weathered fence. As the children grew up and his practice matured, he built himself a new house, and eventually a new atelier. He bought more houses in Haldenstein. “Every time someone died, he bought the house,” Anna said.
Zumthor retained a feel for simple joinery, and many of his early projects are wooden, including a pair of restrained timber sheds that protect the excavation of a Roman ruin in Chur. Even now, his practice remains homespun, suspicious of glamour, and he is ironic about more prolific architects, with so many projects that they become mere businesspeople. “He trusts non-architects more than he trusts architects,” Melissa de La Harpe, who has worked at the atelier for five years, told me. “He asks his children about his projects.” In recent years, his children have discouraged him from accepting commissions. They want him to stay home.
Zumthor’s earliest experiences remain his strongest aesthetic guides. One day, he took me to see Mariastein Abbey, a Benedictine monastery tucked into the Jura Mountains, above Oberwil. Every year of his childhood, Zumthor took part in a procession from the village church to the abbey, leaving with hundreds of other pilgrims before dawn and walking through the fields, carrying an enormous cross. “It looked like an Italian movie,” he told me.
We got out of the car and walked into a broad, deserted square, made spacious for pilgrims. Mariastein’s limestone façade glowed in the afternoon sun. “I think it’s a marvel,” he said. “It’s so serene and simple.” Was it really that complicated to make a monument to anchor and define a public space? “All it takes is the square, the house, and a door,” he said.
We passed through the nave, where sun streamed through the windows, striking fat-faced cherubs and their golden trumpets, and descended into the underbelly of the church. The walls grew rough and turned to rock. A window framed a view of a forested limestone cliff, where, in the miracle that put the site on the pilgrim map, a child falling to his death is said to have been saved by the Virgin Mary. We kept walking, until the natural light was snuffed. Zumthor’s favorite spaces are whorled, with a hidden inner core. Finally, we entered a shadow-soaked cave that smelled of candle smoke, where petitioners were praying to a statue of Mary. Zumthor paid a hundred Swiss francs and lit a candle for Annalisa. For several years, owing to complications from an old cancer, she has been confined to a wheelchair. “She’s Protestant and doesn’t believe,” he said softly. “But you should do it anyway.”
The project that announced Zumthor to the world is Therme Vals, the spa, which was completed in 1996. A Tetris-like assortment of plunge pools half submerged in a bucolic hillside, the baths have a seductive power. “It’s the Xanadu effect, the beauty of the remote,” one architecture critic told me. “It’s so sensual, it’s so delicious in so many ways, and it photographs so beautifully.” Zumthor’s spa is regarded as an exalted expression of regional modernism: site-specific, culturally grounded, made from local materials using traditional techniques.
Vals, an avalanche-prone Alpine village of a thousand people, is home to a thousand sheep and a springwater bottling plant owned by Coca-Cola. It is an hour or so from Haldenstein—past waterfalls, through clouds, around hairpin turns overhung with slick rocks. In the nineteen-eighties, Vals was a shrinking speck with few prospects and a decrepit, German-owned resort beside natural hot springs. Several Valsers persuaded the owners to sell the resort and the springs to the townspeople. “We were reflecting, what shall we do with this sorry bloody hotel?” Pius Truffer, a local quarry owner who led the citizens’ board overseeing the project, told me. “We started dreaming, dreaming. Maybe we should invest in something unique—a spa, a swimming pool, which would attract people from all over the world to Vals!” Hoping to find an architect who could reimagine the resort, they hired Zumthor.
For more than a decade, Zumthor interrogated the features of a mountain soak, trying to determine its quintessence. How cold is the water in an Alpine lake, how deep? What does the stone feel like on the soles of your feet? Would it be nice to bathe in hay? Or lie on heated gravel? (No and no.) Perhaps visitors would like to descend into a cave, engulfed in heat and steam, and contemplate life? Truffer told me that one of the villagers said, “Peter, it’s like a crematorium!”
According to Truffer, the community grew exasperated with Zumthor’s process, fearing that they had entrusted their precious resource to an artist on a journey, not an architect with a plan. “There was widespread opposition,” he told me. “They said, ‘We cannot spend our money for modern art. We would like to have a spa and take a bath.’ Peter said, ‘Ja, about feeling and ambience, you have to trust me.’ ”
Zumthor reduced the materials to water, glass, brass, and stone—no visible pipes or ducts, no clocks except a single hidden timepiece on a brass eyestalk. “It’s a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total art work,” he told me. The walls are made from elongated quartzite bricks, with gray-scale variations reminiscent of the larchwood slats of his atelier. Open seams in the ceiling allow sunlight to enter in ghostly lines—some defining an alternative volume within the space, others fanning out like an annunciation. A brass spout funnels water from the source, St. Petersquelle, into a brass basin with cups attached by chains. In one secluded pool, swimming around a corner reveals a chamber where the human voice harmonizes with the room so that humming creates a glorious Gregorian echo. “It’s an accident,” Zumthor said. “I wouldn’t know how to do this. Sometimes we deserve to be lucky, right?”
The spa was a wild success. Zumthor began renovating the hotel, and for several years Annalisa managed it, alongside Truffer. In a unique experiment, the villagers owned the resort, and the proceeds flowed back into their town. “It was a social-cultural project,” Zumthor told me, a fantasy of communal life made real. He built a trio of small vacation houses for his family in Leis, an even tinier village on a slope overlooking Vals.
But Truffer was still dreaming of how to maximize the potential that had been tapped. Global nomads and art-fair habitués were flocking to Vals. What if he gave them more? According to Zumthor, Truffer sought out Remo Stoffel, a young financier who had grown up in town, where his father worked at the bottling plant; he bought the hotel, driving the Zumthors out of Vals.
Stoffel renamed the resort 7132, and began commissioning projects from other architects. Thom Mayne, a co-founder of the Los Angeles firm Morphosis, designed a new entryway for the hotel, a groovy white stucco overhang that resembles a half-sucked Life Saver. Mayne, along with Tadao Ando and Kengo Kuma, major Japanese architects, was hired to create suites, for a special wing called the House of Architects. Zumthor was not amused. “I saw the rooms my colleagues made—awful,” he told me. He had lived and worked in Vals on and off for twenty years. His starchitect colleagues were faxing it in from nine time zones away. So much for regionalism.
Morphosis soon announced that it would build another hotel for 7132, “a minimalist object connecting guests to nature.” Clad in reflective material, it would be the tallest tower in Europe and, with only one room per floor, would provide “exclusive panoramic views of the Alps.” Five years later, there is no sign of construction. “It’s a protected groundwater zone, where Coca-Cola gets the water,” Zumthor said. “I could have told Thom Mayne, ‘Forget about your tower.’ ” Even unbuilt, the project violated the spirit of his work in Vals. “That soil is the sacred source of minerals,” he told me. “My colleagues are so conceited, they don’t ask me, ‘What do you think? This is your bath.’ ”
Stoffel abruptly moved to Dubai last year, and Mayne did not respond to requests for an interview. Truffer, too, no longer works for 7132, but he maintains that the plan was always to juxtapose Zumthor’s works with other architects’. “That is not the right solution, to say every building in this valley is Zumthor, Zumthor, Zumthor,” he said. “The village has said, ‘This is not Zumthortown.’ ”
With his total art work destroyed, Zumthor disavows the spa and rarely visits. “It makes me puke,” he told me. Still, Vals has proved a powerful tool for Govan’s fund-raising. Several years ago, after the casino owner and philanthropist Elaine Wynn became co-chair of LACMA’s board, she and Govan arranged a jaunt to Europe to see Zumthor’s work. They spent, she recalled, “the most magical night at the baths,” and she and her granddaughter stayed over in one of the Zumthor chalets in Leis. When she returned, she recounted her experience to the rest of the board. “Michael is a dream weaver,” Wynn told me. “When you get through with him, you want to say, ‘Well? How much?’ ” She donated fifty million dollars to the new building, and says that almost every member of the board has made a contribution. “We shamed a few people,” she said. “Like, ‘Come on, man, you can do better!’ ” The naming rights went to David Geffen, who offered a hundred and fifty million dollars, the largest single gift in LACMA’s history.
For the new building, Govan wanted a one-story, horizontal structure, with abundant natural light and physical heft. It needed to be solid, elemental, grounded. “Most architecture in Los Angeles is quite temporary-feeling,” Govan said. “Built with sticks. What L.A. needed, and what would stand out next to the primordial quality of the tar pits and the ancientness of our collections, was gravitas and real materials.” The building should look old, excavated rather than superimposed—something that “feels like it was there forever and should be there forever.”
Inside, the program would be radical—a reinvention of the encyclopedic museum for the twenty-first century. The 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. In LACMA’s Ahmanson Building, Islamic, South Asian, and Southeast Asian art were on the fourth floor. “Less than a quarter of the people go up there,” Govan told me. He wanted the future LACMA to have no front, no back; no up or down. Flatness means access, as mall developers know. “It is essential that we create an equitable organization of cultures, equally accessible, and it is also essential in art history that we start to look at history from different points of view,” he said. The object was to engage visitors, not to instruct them. “Who wants them to see thousands of things?” he said. “You want them to stay longer.”
Zumthor’s first design was a pair of glass boxes, contained on the northern side of Wilshire Boulevard and cantilevered over the tar pits. Govan was unimpressed. Years passed. “I showed them drawings and things—they looked so ugly,” Zumthor said. “After two to three years of hard work, it looks worse and worse.” After presenting the sixth version of his idea, and suffering through a nearly wordless dinner in a restaurant in Haldenstein, Zumthor was certain that he would be fired. The next morning, he got up early and went to the atelier. He swept the model off its mount, and on a chalkboard drew a large amoeba, in conversation with the shape of the site’s main tar pit. “The Black Flower!” Zumthor said. But a new problem presented itself. The amoeba shape encroached on the tar pit, which is an active excavation site, and the director of the natural-history museum objected. There was another way to go: the building could cross Wilshire and land in a parking lot owned by LACMA. Zumthor said, “The breakthrough power came out of frustration and desperation, out of ‘God damn it, there is no solution here!’ ”
I first heard Zumthor describe the building in 2017, at a talk held in Pereira’s Bing Theatre, at LACMA. Every seat was taken, one of them by Frank Gehry. From the stage, Zumthor suggested that encyclopedic museums fail by definition. No museum can be a complete catalogue of all art, and no master narrative explains how disparate objects relate. A new encyclopedic museum, therefore, must not strain for logic but appeal to the visitor’s emotions. “These museums, they shouldn’t say—to me, nowadays—Look, we know everything from East to West, from 4000 to the present,” he said. “They should say this: There were people before us, and look what they did.” The objects in LACMA’s collection were deracinated, he said, cut loose from their contexts and histories. “I think this could be my task, to create a new home, a temporary home for these homeless pieces,” he said.
A screen behind Zumthor displayed the latest rendering of the building, with glass walls sandwiched between two undulating slices of concrete, a profile like sci-fi eyewear. “Maybe art should not be housed in palaces, closed like castles where you need a high-school degree to enter, or a doctorate,” he said. “It should be open to the people.”
According to the rendering, the floor plate will be thirty feet off the ground, supported by towers on either side of Wilshire Boulevard. In the space below, people will visit stores and restaurants within the tower bases, and wander among them, encountering outdoor sculptures by Alexander Calder and Tony Smith. The exhibition level will be broken up into boxy, conventional galleries; intimate cul-de-sacs, with only one door, like a chapel; and irregular rooms formed from the negative space in between. The corridors along the building’s perimeter, with glass on one side, will provide more exhibition space, along with benches where museumgoers can sit and look out at the city beyond. Sidelight is flattering to sculpture and ceramic; the darker interior galleries would suit sensitive works on paper. “I can’t think of another museum that has these types of spaces,” Govan told me later. “These are the Zumthoresque spaces, with the play of light and shadow, to get that emotional response.”
“What do I want to offer to the visitor?” Zumthor said at the talk. “I think we should all be able to make personal discoveries as we go along. And that the architecture is made in a way that you don’t go from object to object reading the tag and then go to the next tag, but you really look at the object, because”—he lowered his voice to a whisper—“there won’t be any tags, I hope.” The audience groaned faintly. “Personal discoveries—this is the start of all the art. Intimate encounters,” he said. “I would like to have rooms in this thing where you all of a sudden would have an intimate encounter with a piece of art.” In such a museum, viewers would find their own way: “Look at the objects of art first, get moved or touched or interested, and then we ask, What is this? What do we know about this? But first the emotion, and then the scientific, academic explanation.”
Zumthor is known to conduct exhaustive research into the conditions and customs of places where he builds. During the mine project, in Norway, he worked for years with local historians. But the emotional approach to learning permits a person to dwell only on what truly interests him. In the late eighties, Zumthor lived for a few months in Los Angeles and taught at SCI-Arc, an experimental architecture school. He went to all the Schindler buildings, learned to manage freeway interchanges, and explored the San Fernando Valley. But he seemed to view the place from a distance, and with some dislike. In “Thinking Architecture,” a book of musings from 1998, he describes the city by night:
One evening, I sat with Zumthor, Govan, and a couple of curators on the terrace of a restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard, across from the museum. One of the curators said that this was the place where Biggie Smalls had been shot. Zumthor looked at her and smiled blankly. A bus idled at a bus stop, and a plane flew overhead. The other curator said, apologetically, “It’s an urban environment.” Then Govan told Zumthor, as if for the first time, that in the days of the grand department stores the neighborhood was named Miracle Mile. “Is it still called Miracle Mile?” Zumthor asked, amused. “There was a time when people think this is such a great stretch? So what were the miracles?”
Kim Cooper and Richard Schave have a business called Esotouric, which offers guided bus tours of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles and James M. Cain’s Glendale. “We advocate for the forgotten, the unimportant,” Cooper told me. Some years ago, using the landmark process, they helped rescue from demolition a bungalow where Charles Bukowski once lived. More recently, they started to fight the planned demolition of the William Pereira buildings at LACMA.
In December, I walked around the site with Cooper and Schave. A large construction fence had been erected, in anticipation of demolition. Cooper pointed at one side of the Bing Theatre, where asbestos abatement was under way. “He’s got these twin fluted columns, almost like chopsticks, very slender, very delicate, wonderful, very distinctly Pereira,” she said. “The whole thing floated above water—walkways took you over these water features.”
Cooper and Schave are native Angelenos, and they were adamant that Zumthor and Govan misunderstood Los Angeles completely. (Much of the negative online commentary about Govan refers to his East Coast origins; one anonymous critic sinisterly encouraged him to seek early retirement on Martha’s Vineyard.) Sure, Zumthor was a talented architect, but he had a context, and it wasn’t Los Angeles. “He’s not aware of L.A.,” Alan Hess, an architect who is working on a book about Pereira, told me. “His building does not relate, it’s superimposed.” Spanning Wilshire would be a disaster. “Angelenos have all been stuck under underpasses, like at Wilshire and 405,” he said. “That’s what that is going to be. It’s a shame. The acoustics under there will be like being in a car in a traffic jam.”
Cooper said, “Everything Michael Govan has done since he came to LACMA has been to create a checkmate situation.” We walked to the western end of the campus, where the old May Company department store stands. LACMA owns the property, but, instead of redeveloping it for the museum’s use, Govan had leased it to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—a hundred and ten years for thirty-six million dollars. The Academy is converting the building into its own museum, with a huge glass-dome addition by Renzo Piano. Cooper peered through a gap in the construction fence. A representative of the Academy, who turned out to be Omar Sharif’s grandson and namesake, greeted her. She asked him if the top-floor restaurant would be preserved; the room, she explained, was haunted by the ghost of a woman whose husband had killed her there in the eighties. Sharif smiled nervously and said that he wasn’t authorized to provide a tour.
Cooper said, “The May Company would have been perfect office space, lab space, theatre space, restaurant space, everything needed. It was essentially given away to the Academy.” By landing in the LACMA parking lot on the other side of Wilshire, Govan had raided the museum’s last trust fund: space for an office building, which the museum could lease out to generate income.
Schave said, “Michael Govan wants it to seem like this is not a battle . . .”
“. . . for the soul of Los Angeles,” Cooper muttered.
“This is very much a battle,” Schave said. “This is a thin red line. This is Chapter 2 of the Bhagavad Gita. You have giant armies assembled.”
Part of the problem was secrecy. The project began out of public view, and even with demolition imminent Govan and Zumthor hadn’t released detailed floor plans. In the spring of 2019, LACMA submitted its final environmental-impact report to the County Board of Supervisors. Reading the document, William Poundstone, an arts writer whose site is called LACMAonfire, observed that the building had shrunk slightly from the draft version—and was now some forty-five thousand square feet smaller than the buildings that it would replace. Joseph Giovannini, an architect and critic in New York who has waged war on the Zumthor project for years, performed a forensic analysis and determined that the design would significantly diminish the number of galleries and cut the exhibition space by twenty per cent. (LACMA disputes his calculations.)
The shrinkage, Giovannini believes, will change the fundamental nature of the institution. “The building he commissioned—based on false premises—is really the Trojan horse,” he told me. While everyone was arguing about the aesthetics of the building, he suggested, Govan had quietly changed the premise of the institution. “You can’t possibly put an encyclopedic museum in a space that size,” he said. “You can do a boutique museum. But Michael doesn’t want an encyclopedia museum. They think encyclopedia is old-brain, that it perpetuates an imperial notion—Napoleon goes to Egypt and takes everything.” Earlier this year, Giovannini, with an organization called the Citizens’ Brigade to Save LACMA, took out full-page ads in the L.A. Times and the New York Times to protest the building, and also held a competition for alternate designs.
According to Govan and Zumthor, the museum is designed to foster “adjacencies,” counter-narratives and moments of cross-cultural connection—in other words, don’t expect to go into a room and see scores of nineteenth-century landscape paintings. J. Patrice Marandel, a retired curator who for two decades helped build LACMA’s world-class European-painting collection, told me that the display of objects in this vision was mere interior decorating. “The idea is to build this structure which some people find beautiful—or not—without thinking about the collection we have, the history we have to preserve, where the only idea is to mix things without any kind of intellectual plan,” he said. “It’s just aesthetic—Cy Twombly looks good next to Chinese bronze, the way it would look good in your living room.”
Christopher Knight, the L.A. Times art critic, acknowledges that encyclopedic museums emerged in a different cultural moment, with questionable motives—but, he argues, they remain relevant, especially in a polyglot city such as Los Angeles. “The great virtue is the juxtaposition of global works of art in one place,” Knight said. “Anyone in the city can go to LACMA and find his or her origin culture and see how it relates to other global cultures.” It didn’t ease Knight’s anxiety when Govan began talking about someday, with more money, building satellite museums in underserved Los Angeles neighborhoods. “It will never happen,” Knight told me. “The expense being racked up for this building will take a very long time to pay off. The satellites are an expression of dismantlement.”
Several months ago, the Ahmanson Foundation, which has given more than a hundred and thirty million dollars’ worth of European paintings and sculpture to the museum, suspended its donations to LACMA. The foundation’s president, William Ahmanson, is the great-nephew of Howard Ahmanson, the lead donor for the original campus; he also sits on the museum’s board. He told me, “We’ve helped LACMA amass a terrific European-art collection, and it seems this building is not going to be sufficient to exhibit it. I’ve heard quietly there are others on the board who are unhappy, but they’re not willing to go against the power structure.”
Critics of the new design tend not to mention that the museum was considerably smaller for much of its life. In Govan’s first few years as director, LACMA opened two new buildings, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and the Resnick Pavilion, both designed by Renzo Piano, which provided an additional hundred thousand square feet of exhibition space. The space would permit the museum to stay open during construction. “You double the size of the museum, halve it during construction, and redouble it with the new building,” Govan said.
At LACMA, Govan has raised a record amount of money for a cultural institution in the city, drawn from public and private sources. But, it turns out, six hundred and fifty million dollars is not all he needs. Recently, he acknowledged that the project would require an additional hundred million, to pay for moving and storing the art during construction, maintaining the Broad and Resnick buildings, and renting office space. (The Zumthor building does not allow for offices, or a conservation lab.) His approach followed the logic of fund-raising: you must have to get. “When you have five hundred million, it’s easy to talk about seven hundred and fifty million,” he told me. “When you have zero to a hundred, it’s a scary thought.” But, for those who oppose Govan, it’s another example of duplicity. With such an expensive building, and more obligations on the horizon, how can the museum continue to expand its collection? Privately, Govan has suggested that LACMA has been misunderstood all along. “Michael says this will never be the Met,” one person close to the project told me. “It’ll never be the Louvre. We got started a hundred and fifty years later than they did. It’s a fantasy that this is encyclopedic in that sense.”
The second floor of Zumthor’s atelier is devoted to the museum and its models. Architects who come to work for Zumthor must first spend three months in the model room. For LACMA, they made tiny replicas of “Urban Light,” a street-lamp sculpture by Chris Burden, out of pins with blobs of translucent glue stuck to their heads. When I visited, a large set of detailed plans, with numbers, was tacked to the wall. Hard costs: $493 million. Total exhibition space: 108,951 square feet. Zumthor, despite being shielded from the critical maelstrom, had managed to get wind of the discussion about shrinkage. He insisted that his critics had misunderstood the galleries on the building’s perimeter. “They think they’re just corridors,” he said. “It’s like they have never heard of an open floor—never heard of Mies or Corbusier. They will see.”
Zumthor regularly visits the models, making a master class of each project while all the architects and the interns gather around. Today, it was a pep talk. “Where are we, where are we going?” he said. “We need to implement the last changes in geometry.” These were the modifications he had asked Govan for, refining the shapes of the interstitial galleries and slightly recontouring the roofline. A pedestal supported a 1:50 scale model of the building: a curvilinear shelf that arced like a boomerang, so that the southern end faced the northern end. The roof plate protruded, like a slight overbite, casting shade. The exterior walls were all translucent, allowing for ample sidelight. To study paving material for the understory, an intern had collected leathery fallen leaves from Zumthor’s garden and torn them up, an approximation of cracked earth. The over-all effect was of a desert palace, equal parts fortress and oasis, sturdy and serene.
“There’s always this conflict between an artistic way of working, when you need another iteration, and the building process, which is a big administration and a lot of money,” Zumthor said. “Michael says, If I’m over budget, I’m gone. He has stressed his board with money so much they have said, This is it. I have a full understanding of their nervousness. We personally have to get the 3.3 million. ”
“I have to be sly as a fox,” Zumthor went on. “The project is in its psychologically worst phase. The museum is empty. People are moving out. Everything looks so sad. People are saying, You will be over budget, the idea won’t work.” But, he said, the same thing had happened at Kunsthaus Bregenz: “The workers were turning away from the crazy architect who had no idea of nothing. But when the scaffolding went away, and people saw the structure, all of a sudden I was someone. When the first glass façade went up, they rolled out the red carpet. This will happen here, I know this.” He addressed the architects again: “We have to go through this. We just have to be strong.”
In late February, Zumthor made his last visit to Los Angeles before demolition. (As it turned out, it was his last trip anywhere for some time; shortly after he got home, Switzerland imposed a strict coronavirus lockdown, and he was sequestered in his home, alone.) The three million dollars had been found. Zumthor said that he had leaned on subcontractors to simplify elements, a process known as “value engineering.” Govan said only that everyone had come together around the changes. In any case, the museum’s corporate officers were mollified, and the work could proceed.
One clear morning, Zumthor arrived at the LACMA campus after his daily tennis, to make a study of the light conditions with the contractor. Critics and commenters had bemoaned the glass walls of the peripheral galleries, another way in which he was out of touch with local conditions. Maybe glass would be appropriate in the gloomy European cities where Zumthor was accustomed to working—but not here, with three hundred and sixty days of sunshine!
Zumthor crossed Wilshire, eating a green apple, his black shirt billowing behind him like a wind sock. Beside the Ahmanson Building, soon to be demolished, sample materials for the new museum had been amassed: a slab of concrete, for the internal walls; black terrazzo, for the floors; a windowpane and some bronze mullions. That was everything, a simple monolith with just a few ingredients. “Please visit the museum!” Zumthor said to the builders who had gathered, gesturing at the impromptu model. He walked around to the northern side of the setup. “We have shadow and sunshine,” he said. The window was a mirror. “You can see there’s a lot of reflection. Because of paintings, we should be in the dark, and the darker we are inside the less we have to draw the curtains.” He checked the south. “Now you see the reflection in the glass is almost gone. I know we all learned this in architecture school—but I wasn’t there!” He laughed.
Zumthor crossed Wilshire again, to a lot where additional slabs of concrete were being craned in for him to examine. “There’s a big discussion we have to have about: how does the concrete, quality-wise, have to look?” he said. “We don’t have to be too polished. This is not a black concrete, O.K.? This is just a bit darker. When we talk about black concrete, we run into problems.” Over time, Zumthor had revised the building’s color from tarry black, which was controversial, to mild beige. Now he was contemplating a weathered gray.
Govan arrived, wearing a charcoal-colored suit—a nice shade for a museum. “What do you say, Maestro?” he called out.
“It’s good to be a little darker,” Zumthor said. “It’s the circle coming back to darker. But this is not black.” No, Govan agreed, definitely not black. “It’s a little bit older. Looks a little bit more historic,” Zumthor said.
Govan agreed. “It looks like it was here,” he said.
That night, Zumthor and Govan celebrated. The last piece of art had been moved out of the Ahmanson, and demolition could begin. By fall, they’d be building. Govan shared in the triumph. “We do what we want, and we are on budget!” he said. “I told you this would happen.”
“Well, I didn’t want to be on budget,” Zumthor said. “I said, ‘I don’t give a fuck if we’re on budget.’ ”
“It’s going to ruin your reputation,” Govan joked.
Zumthor looked at him. “I said, ‘We have to build, and they can’t go back.’ ” ♦
An earlier version of this article inaccurately described the La Brea Tar Pits site.
