Christopher Hawthorne, the Los Angeles Times architecture critic, is asking some provocative questions about the overhauled design of the proposed replacement to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Wilshire Boulevard.

Both the former and the new concept for replacing LACMA's unloved, mid-1960s buildings are by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. The first concept intruded on the footprint (and airspace) of the La Brea tar pits and their trove of paleontological specimens. The revised plan loops away from the pits and crosses over Wilshire Boulevard.

Hawthorne asks what Zumthor's flat, sinuous blob of a design says about Los Angeles. He wonders if Zumthor's intersection of place and structure is missing the point.

"(M)y feelings about Zumthor's LACMA have grown more complicated," he wrote in his Critic's Notebook recently. "The more I think about the plan's newly attenuated form, stretched like a piece of black bubble gum across Wilshire, the more I wonder if the architect's basic reading of Los Angeles could use an update.”