Piano Tunes up LACMA Plans

Piano Tunes up LACMA Plans
It's part 1950s Case Study house, part magic carpet, part canopy of trees and part old-world piazza.

If all goes well, this should add up to the new face of the largest encyclopedic art museum in the western U.S., to be completed in less than two years.

During a busy, less than 72-hour stop in Los Angeles last week, architect Renzo Piano discussed the development of his plans for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

"I don't think it's changed a lot," said the lanky, low-key Piano, strolling the site in a battered tan coat.

The 20-acre campus, its soil crossed with tractor tracks, had been lined with a limestone footprint to define the project's contours.

"Just the fine-tuning: size, detail, construction, how you put things together."

Some of the plan's details had been filled in -such as the design for the glass-enclosed Lynda and Stewart Resnick Grand Entrance Pavilion and accenting the campus with bright colors -and there was one tangible change: the streamlining of a plan to hang brightly colored fabric scrims and banners along Wilshire Boulevard.

Piano originally had said these screens would offer unity to a campus widely regarded as confusing and disparate.

"In reality," Piano conceded, the plan "was a bit too complicated and expensive' and might have hidden or obscured the