Redesign of Museum a Waste of Resources

Re “5 Architects Will Compete to Redesign County Art Museum,” May 4: I’m an artist and love museums. But our beloved LACMA is coming out with a plan to spend $200 million to tear down the Ahmanson Building to make more walking space and also to correct a “mishmash of architectural styles.”

So LACMA officials made colossal errors in judgment. Each time they added a building they used a different style. (They just now noticed it doesn’t go together?) This is the equivalent of a French provincial home adding on a new Spanish adobe master wing. Too bad, I say.

Let LACMA use only $100 million to correct those mistakes, by external changes, if necessary, and don’t tear down a perfectly good building--that’s just plain waste. Use the remaining $100 million to build and maintain a LACMA Art Center in the central city. This would not only be a place to display art and see films about the arts, but a place to learn to paint, sculpt, dance, play musical instruments, write, read--and all of that free. This would include learning the computer and how to do computerized graphic design, the best-paying job in the arts right now. Come on, LACMA. Help to correct some of the real “uglies” in this beautiful city of ours.

Jean Haskell Stephenson

Malibu