Director Michael Govan’s desire to build a monument—and not the museum’s program, not its functions, certainly not its collections—set the agenda for this project. The collections have been the soul and backbone of LACMA and would be the envy of most museums, but the impulse behind the architectural effort, the unstated subconscious of the project, was to sensationalize the design into a spectacle. Size mattered. Architect Peter Zumthor bloated the building gratuitously, stretching it from one side of Wilshire to the other despite shrinking the total gallery space itself.
Source : The Demolition of LACMA: Art Sacrificed to Architecture
