There 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 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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
