An Unfinished Frankenstein's Monster' - The Disastrous New Orange County Museum of Art - Architecture - The Guardian

2/3/23, 10:03 AM ‘An unfinished Frankenstein’s monster’: the disastrous new Orange County Museum of Art | Architecture | The
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‘An unfinished Frankenstein’s monster’: the
disastrous new Orange County Museum of Art
With ambitiously fractured form, this $94m gallery is open to
visitors – if they can find their way inside – but its wonkily
assembled parts are a long way from complete
Oliver Wainwright
@ollywainwright
Tue 13 Dec 2022 12.42 GMT
T
here is a critical point in the creation of contemporary, computer-aided
architecture where the elaborate forms conjured on screen must be
translated into physical reality. The sweeping, seamless plains of gravity-
defying digital matter are transformed into substantial chunks of steel
and concrete, usually clad with a thin decorative shell to give the illusion of a solid,
sculpted mass. It is a process that relies on extreme levels of precision, careful
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2/3/23, 10:03 AM ‘An unfinished Frankenstein’s monster’: the disastrous new Orange County Museum of Art | Architecture | The Guardian
thought about how the multi-dimensional jigsaw will fit together, and exactly what
forms of bolting, welding and fixing are required to simulate the flawless vision.
Sometimes it goes wrong. What appeared to be a feasible junction of multi-curved

panels on screen turns out to be an impossible thing to achieve with human hands,
power tools and the laws of physics, in the face of immovable deadlines. The panels
of steel and glass and terracotta don’t always bend and swoop in the way the
architect had hoped.
Ruptured and splintered in more ways than one … Some of the OCMA building’s defects. Photograph:
Oliver Wainwright
Nowhere is the gulf between digital promise and physical fact more spectacularly
evident than at the new Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) in California, which
stands as a $94m (£77m) hymn to the difference between render and reality. From a
distance, its sinuous white flanks buckle and bend with the trademark fractured
geometries of its architects, the Los Angeles practice Morphosis. The facade rears up
around a corner, folding in on itself to embrace a roof terrace, with a similar
wayward energy to the torqued steel plates of a rusty Richard Serra sculpture that
stands outside.
But, as you approach the building, you see that the ruptured, splintered aesthetic
goes beyond the sculptural moves alone. Sheets of buckled steel are screwed
crookedly against the edge of the undulating facade, hastily cut tiles have been
fitted with wonky abandon, while other parts of the building are literally held on
with tape. A temporary clamp keeps part of a soffit from falling down, while glass
balustrades lean at precarious angles, their oversized steel fixing plates bolted with
Frankenstein glee. The shop of horrors continues inside, where sheets of painted
foam-board stand in place of steel coping, cracked glass floors line precipitous aerial
walkways, and suspended ceilings appear to have been cobbled together from
whatever leftover bits were lying around. The US construction industry isn’t known
for its attention to detail, but this is something else.
Refusing to have an edge … the Orange County Museum of Art. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright
Thom Mayne, the 78-year-old Pritzker prize winning founder of Morphosis, has
always had an interest in the provisional, contingent nature of architecture. “I have

no interest in completing projects,” he said in a recent interview. “A lot of our stuff
just keeps moving; it refuses to have an edge, a boundary; it’s in constant change.”
In Orange County, he seems to have taken his passion for leaving projects
unfinished a bit too far.
“The museum had to open in October, before it was ready,” says Brandon Welling,
partner in charge of the project, “which wasn’t ideal. Normally there’s an
acclimation period, with time to go through the ‘punch list’ of things to finish, but
we’re still going through that process now.” Every project goes through a process of
“snagging” at completion, when small defects are addressed, but it’s rare to have
quite such a long list.
The builders, Clark Construction, say that the project was impacted by supply chain
delays. “There are no defects,” they insist, “but rather a delay in certain supplies to
complete custom elements of the design. The project reached completion and was
delivered to the client on time.” They say that the broken and bent pieces, along
with clamps and tape, are “temporary placeholders, as not all custom materials
could be replaced ahead of the museum’s opening.” Workers are currently
undergoing a tortuous process of replacing numerous pieces of cladding, coping and
glazing during the night and on Mondays, when the museum is closed, at a rate of
about two pieces a day, with the goal of having the work finished by the end of the
year. It’s an optimistic deadline, to say the least. Still, the museum is sanguine.
‘Beauty in imperfection’ … inside the Orange County Museum of Art. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright
“It doesn’t bother me,” says a cheerful Heidi Zuckerman, director of OCMA. “I
believe in wabi-sabi – I think there’s a beauty in imperfection. Sometimes you can
only appreciate a finished thing by experiencing it unfinished.” She joined the
museum in January 2021, midway through construction, and inherited a project that
already had a long and tortured history. “There had been 17 designs,” she says, “over
14 years.”
Morphosis won the competition in 2007, when the museum was set to be more than
double the size, and was to feature a luxury condo tower sprouting from its roof.
The 2008 financial crisis put paid to the wisdom of museums getting involved in
speculative real estate ventures, and the project was drastically downsized. The
design originally had a broad staircase running up from ground level to a public roof
terrace, but conversations about ticketing and security scuppered that idea. Instead,
a stunted remnant of the stair now lies in front of the museum, marooned like an
abandoned fragment of another project, blocking the ground floor cafe and shop
from view, and generally confusing visitors.
“Do you know where the entrance is?” a retired couple asks, as I stand with Welling
by the orphaned steps, where an aggressively angled glass balustrade seems
intended to dissuade much lingering. Up above, out of reach, another broad
staircase rises to the second-floor roof terrace, cut off from the ground-level steps,
like estranged siblings that will never be reunited. Just to rub it in, the museum is
now free and ticketless, so the staircase could have continued from the plaza to the
roof terrace after all.
OCMA is the latest addition to an arts campus in downtown Costa Mesa, located just
off the San Diego freeway, where a hotel, offices and stucco apartment blocks cluster
with the air of a suburban business park. The late Henry Segerstrom, a local
developer who made his billions building one of the country’s most profitable
shopping malls nearby, in what were the family’s butter bean fields, established the
Segerstrom Center for the Arts in 1983. He started with a gigantic pink granite opera
house, its mighty stone arch exuding 80s power-dressing, followed by a concert hall
and theatre with a rippling glass front in 2006, by César Pelli. Segerstrom donated
the final corner plot to OCMA in 1998, when the museum was planning to relocate,
having started out life in 1962 as a pavilion in Newport Beach, six miles south. It has
taken until now, with multiple changes of leadership, to see it materialise.
Coming by car – as most people in Orange County do – you have a choice of five
parking garages, the closest of which, for $20, deposits you in an office forecourt
around the back of the museum. You therefore arrive not at the entrance, but at the
loading bay, where a long blank facade of grey metal grilles provides an inauspicious
welcome. A locked, unmarked door, with a sign that reads “no roof access”, leads up
to the public roof terrace, which the museum hopes to open as the primary daytime
route to the terrace. It has less of the feeling of ascending the Spanish Steps in
Rome, as Mayne had imagined, and more that of being shuffled up a fire escape by
the bins.
Swirling … the atrium of the Orange County Museum of Art. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright
Once you have walked around the building to find the entrance, and as long as you
don’t look up, things start to improve. From the swirling atrium, a shallow slope
leads down into the main galleries, a pair of big, six-metre-high rooms that can be
subdivided, where angled ceiling fins flood the space with ambient artificial light.
To the side, a long street-facing window looks into a corridor gallery, where a
colourful mural provides a jazzy billboard, and the sidewalk runs inside to form a
bench. A staircase leads to a crescent-shaped mezzanine gallery, which spits you
back out into the atrium, and the queasy vortex of colliding panels. The floor above
houses a restaurant (open but also unfinished) and a bar, where a glass bridge leads
to an education space – prominently housed in the big swooping lump that leans
over the plaza down below. Standing at the bar, another couple asks hopefully if
there is more art upstairs, but it turns out the tempting glass bridge above is purely
for maintenance access.
It’s easy to see why they might be disappointed. It is a boon that this place is free
(for the first 10 years, thanks to a donation by Lugano Diamonds), but the museum
hasn’t, in the end, got much gallery for its buck. Cladding kinks, staircase mishaps
and entrance muddles aside, the building is still lacking. Like many projects from
the Morphosis stable, it has resulted in a very elaborate and expensive envelope,
shouting its rollercoaster acrobatics at full volume, wrapping a sequence of interior
spaces that have little to do with the performative shell. Almost a generation in the
making, it feels like the final death rattle of a bygone age, the last gasp of an era
preoccupied with novel form for form’s sake. Perhaps it is fitting that this flimsy,
paper-thin architecture is held together with tape.
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2/3/23, 10:03 AM ‘An unfinished Frankenstein’s monster’: the disastrous new Orange County Museum of Art | Architecture | The

ture | The Guardian

News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle

Sometimes it goes wrong. What appeared to be a feasible junction of multi-curved

always had an interest in the provisional, contingent nature of architecture. “I have

Single Monthly Annual

$3 per month $6 per month Other

Continue Remind me in March

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