LACMA: Suicide by Architecture, Schematics

Joseph Giovannini provides schematics used in his analysis of the Zumthor-LACMA reconstruction proposal.

By Joseph GiovanniniApril 18, 2019

The images below illustrate the proposed changes to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) discussed in Joseph Giovannini's LARB article of April 5, 2019.

Giovannini’s article is based on a thorough analysis of the material that LACMA released in its Environmental Impact Report (EIR), a square foot audit of the provided site plan of the Zumthor project in both the Final EIR (released March 2019) and the Draft EIR (released November 2018), a square foot audit of plans of the existing buildings to be demolished, and on information provided by LACMA’s Press office in reaction to submitted questions. Giovannini had a complete square foot audit and analysis performed by one architect and then checked by a second architecture office.

1) Zumthor FEIR

2) Zumthor DEIR

3) Existing Galleries

4) Existing Gross SF

LARB Contributor

A Pulitzer nominee in criticism who trained in architecture at Harvard, Joseph Giovannini has led a career that has spanned three decades and two coasts. He has served as the architecture critic for New York Magazine and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and was long a staff writer on design and architecture for The New York Times. On a contractual or freelance basis, he has contributed to many other publications, including The New Yorker, Architectural Record, Architectural Digest, Art in America, Art Forum, Architecture Magazine, Architect Magazine, Industrial Design Magazine, and Interior Design.

A prominent figure in American architecture, he has been an activist critic with a record of discovering emerging talent for major mainstream publications and professional journals. He coined the term Deconstructivism during articles he wrote announcing the movement. Giovannini has written literally thousands of articles for periodicals, and he has also authored numerous essays for books and monographs. As a critic, he has won awards, grants and honors, from the Art World Magazine/Manufacturer’s Hanover Trust for distinguished newspaper architectural criticism, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Graham Foundation, the Los Angeles Chapter of the AIA and the California Council of the AIA.

He has put theory into practice in his own architectural practice. Mr. Giovannini heads Giovannini Associates, which has recently completed the conversion of a large trucking warehouse into a community of lofts in Los Angeles, and a 19th-century commercial building, also into lofts. A bicoastal designer, he is currently working on several apartments in New York and lofts in Los Angeles. His lofts, apartments, galleries and additions have appeared in Architectural Digest, Los Angeles Times Magazine, A + U, Domus, House and Garden, GA Houses, Architekur und Wohnen, Sites, and Interior Design.

He has taught advanced and graduate design studios at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, UCLA’s Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning, the University of Southern California’s School of Architecture, and at the University of Innsbruck. He holds a Master in Architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He did his B.A. in English at Yale University, and an M.A in French Language and Literature from Middlebury College for work done at La Sorbonne, Paris.