It’s hard to think of an institution taking up 20 acres of Miracle Mile real estate as an underdog, but that’s how the Los Angeles County Museum of Art looked just a few years ago when private donors failed to line up with their checkbooks behind Eli Broad and a few LACMA trustees, and voters rejected a bond measure that would have guaranteed a massive chunk of the estimated $200 million to $300 million for the museum’s much-touted plans to demolish and replace all but the historic May Company building (now LACMA West) and the Bruce Goff–designed Japanese Pavilion on its Wilshire campus with a new tent-topped monolithic structure designed by Rem Koolhaas. But by 2004, the museum was back with a new plan by architect Renzo Piano to rehab the campus and add a new contemporary-art museum backed by Broad, and by the time director Andrea Rich announced her retirement in 2005, the museum had raised more than $150 million toward its transformation. With new leadership in place, the first in three phases of what the museum has now officially termed its Transformation with a capital “T” well under way, and the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) about to open, LACMA is poised to become the region’s premiere cultural mecca. Here are... More >>>