A populist triumph over museum elites? Craig Hodgetts takes on the Petersen Automotive Museum — Craig Hodgetts – formmag.net
That the skin is an exercise in advanced digital fabrication, applied with such élan is, in itself, a proclamation, a sort of late-career renaissance, which thrusts the firm into a next generation spotlight.
Whether naively assuming (wrongly) that Los Angeles was ready for a jolt of architectural electricity, or sincerely reflecting a populist genre (rightly), Kohn succeeded in outflanking its neighbors, and disrupting the conventions governing the museum establishment.
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Googies (the restaurant) was a striped and angular spot that catered to the four-wheeled extravaganzas cruising by. The ones that Bob Petersen began to chronicle in a start-up magazine called Hot Rod. The ones the Beach Boys sing about and Tom Wolfe writes about. The ones that built an empire out of a new kind of polyglot expressionism that used the belts and springs and pipes, the valve covers and fans, those curling manifolds and gaping intakes, the sawed-off roofs and smoothed out noses to send good vibrations all across America.
Critics didn’t get it. But artists did. Billy Al and Bob Irwin, Chamberlain and Valentine mined it for all they were worth, hanging hoods and crushed parts like hunting trophies on the walls of museums everywhere.
Which brings us to the Petersen Museum, many decades later. Years after McDonald’s abandoned its golden arches for a tepid logo. A long time after good taste ran roughshod over the works of John Lautner and Schindler – good architects all – a vanguard doomed to obscurity and the wrecking ball. Today’s anointed ones, proud in the parametric livery probably didn’t notice when a museum to celebrate the cars of that era was in the making, and shrugged at the temerity of a New Yorker trying to put his stamp on the Miracle Mile. So one can understand the yowls of Main Street, the bewilderment of pundits, and the deer-in headlights consternation of our revered tastemakers.
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One might assess the strategic vision as achieving the maximum visual effect with the least. Less being way more, since the reworking of the existing building is to be found almost exclusively in the metal panels streaming around it—held together by well positioned struts—evoking the painted flames of the classic hot rods while assuming an architectural/installation art posture.
What Kohn didn’t get—what so many of a Eurocentric persuasion haven’t and perhaps are not capable of “getting”—is the creative depth that lurks behind the flashy skins of LA’s reputation for architectural innovation, which leads to an attitude that a skin-deep project is called for, even appreciated, while nothing could be further from the truth.
Here, in a town that invented the close-up, patented the special effect, and perfected lighting, one imagined a display of automotive art bordering on the erotic, with coachwork by Falaschi, Farina and Superleggera, the flowing lines and glossy surfaces of the Petersen’s collection are voluptuous as a 50s starlet—and deserved more than a perfunctory sprinkling of downlights.
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