Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor has rejiggered his masterplan for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art‘s (LACMA) campus to avoid the neighboring La Brea Tar Pits. When the original designs for the massive, $650-million overhaul of LACMA’s disjointed group of buildings was announced last year, the administration of the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits raised objections and claimed that the Zumthor plan would block rainfall and sunlight on the geological tourist destination and still-active paleontological research site rich with Ice Age fossils.
The new plan, as Jori Finkel writes for the New York Times, calls for a building that keeps its distance from the tar pits, instead stretching across Wilshire Boulevard to land on a lot currently used for parking.
