Vincent Price Art Museum, East Los Angeles, designed by Arquitectonica
One of Tim Burton’s mentors and actors was also founder of an eponymous museum. That would be Vincent Price, star of 1950s horror films and featured in Burton’s Edward Scissorhands. In 1951 Price donated 90 artworks to East Los Angeles College. Six years later he founded an art gallery at the college. It reopened last week, as the Vincent Price Art Museum, in a brand-new building by Miami-based Arquitectonica (top).
The three-story structure has room for temporary shows and rotations from the permanent collection of 9000 works, about 2000 donated by Price himself. Typical of Hollywood collectors, Price’s collection was wide-ranging but weak. That’s almost beside the point here. Were it not for Price, the East L.A. region wouldn’t have an art museum. (Strictly speaking, VPAM is in Monterey Park.) Arquitectonica is a big name, comparable to Renzo Piano and bigger than William Pereira, designer of the original LACMA campus.
Your call:
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, designed by William Pereira; Hardy, Holzman, Pfeiffer Assoc.; Bruce Goff; Renzo Piano
Tags: Arquitectonica, Bruce Goff, LACMA, Renzo Piano, Tim Burton, Vincent Price, Vincent Price Art Museum, William Pereira
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They are both colorless monstrosities, however the LACMA buildings have variability and can be painted, the one which is possibly better as is, not. Architects now dream of being sculptors, the reason for their being overlooked and diminished. They are homes, where people live, work and gather. Not showcases of fashionable ideas and new materials.
I love when architects use the new, but to do what has always been, a rich and living experience of a mutitude of senses and passions. It is all line and form now, color be damned. In other words, no soul. They are sterile and made to be photographed and put in magaiznes, not used and lived in.
One can easily enliven lACMA as I have shown one way on my blog, paint the damn thing. Just the concrete pillars, burnt umber with deep yellow in the folds on the Ahmanson. Burnt orange panels on top and below, burnt red on the entrance level from Times Courtyard, which transistions to reddish pillars on the Hammer with burnt Umber insets, appearing to be redwood trees rising above Hancock park. This puts them in their environment, and with gold insets in white pillars with blue panels on the Bing, unites AND enlivens a drab and boring experience. Greens also on the supporting pillars above and on panels to unite the three buildings through the courtyard supports.
Try color people, our effette and sterile age has abandoned what it does not understand, feel and truly fears. And is quite cheap, and able to change as times do. Without tearing down perfectly useful buildings, instead of constructing more fashionably sterile and soon to be outdated monstrosities in replacement.
Class and passion know no age, they are eternal, which our self absorbed times of instant gratification and hubris deny. They are the twin poles of creativity, structure and growth. Masculine and feminine, ages passing on to the new, building on what was and truly is part of who WE are, instead of showpieces for the vain and tacky ego driven for a false godhood, mausoleums to their “benefactors”, who are truly up to no good at all.
Save the eternal, colorful and spiritual Watts Towers, tear down the sterile, vain and souless Ivories.
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