Piano transforms LACMA.

Following a 40-year succession of mis-steps, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has finally commissioned architecture worthy of its encyclopaedic collections of classic and contemporary Asian, European, and American arts. These are ranked among the finest in the United States, and the museum has launched a succession of noteworthy exhibitions, but the treasures have been scattered through a visually chaotic complex of galleries strung out along Wilshire Boulevard. In the early 1960s, LACMA's first director, Richard Brown, urged that the original building be commissioned from Mies; instead, the board and the County Supervisors settled for William Pereira, who gave them a warmed-over Beaux Arts complex of three separate pavilions surrounded by a moat that leaked and had to be drained.

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Water was the only element that flowed freely through the disconnected spaces, and so, 20 years later, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates was invited to add space and bring order to the complex. The hybrid resembles Frankenstein's monster: tepid Classicism and bombastic streamline awkwardly stitched together. It still didn't work as a unity, and LACMA continued to grow piecemeal, from LACMA West (the former May Company department store) to the Bruce Goff/Bart Prince Pavilion for Japanese Art in Hancock Park--extending 450m (the length of two ocean liners) from one end to the other.

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Renzo Piano hopes to turn this discontinuity to advantage, emphasising context and connective tissue as much as new construction. He saw an opportunity to create an urban sense of place on a scale very similar to that of a walled Italian city such as San Gimignano or Urbino. However, his chief inspiration came from the Case Study houses, and the benign climate that prompted Richard Meier to create an indoor-outdoor experience at the Getty Center. Rejecting monumentality, Piano expresses a preference for an airy, lightweight architecture. Coloured scrims, cued to paintings of Rothko, Klee and Max Bill, will provide a unified street facade, and the disparate blocks will be experienced as a succession of urban events opening off an axial concourse.

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In moves he regards as miraculous in this car culture, a parking structure will be levelled (the cars will go underground) and a street will be closed. These clearances will provide space for the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) and a glass entrance pavilion. Billionaire businessman Eli Broad pledged $50 million towards the construction of the new gallery to house his collection of contemporary art along with new LACMA acquisitions, and more than $100 million will come from other donors.

This rational, pragmatic solution to a long-running institutional problem has a good chance of success, in contrast to the iconoclastic proposal of Rem Koolhaas to tear down most of the existing buildings, and put five collections under a soaring translucent canopy. The LACMA board rashly selected this proposal in early 2002 and just as quickly dropped it when they realised the impossibility of raising around $300 million while alienating the local philanthropists whose names, engraved on the doomed galleries, would be ground to dust.

BCAM is a modestly-scaled H-plan block of skylit galleries, with angled roof-top louvres that are feathered to dematerialise the mass, much like Piano's basket structures on Noumea, or the crown of the New York Times tower, which is now under construction. The glass entrance pavilion, containing those essential amenities of shop, cafe, restaurant, and donors' room, will appear to float within a spacious plaza, and the entire site will be landscaped over underground parking, extending the park that encloses the La Brea tar pits to the east.

Piano's programme of museum additions now extends from the Whitney and the Morgan Library in New York to California, by way of the Chicago Art Institute. Each poses a unique set of challenges and opportunities, but shares the need to fuse the intimate contemplation of art--an experience the architect characterises as sacred--with the profane gathering of people in a public place. His skill in achieving a harmonious balance was demonstrated in the Menil (AR March 1987) and Beyeler (AR December 1997) museums and is likely to be reprised in the Zentrum Paul Klee near Berne, which opens in mid-June. To provide a context for his latest venture, LACMA is exhibiting a selection of his key projects until 2 October, in the same dramatic installation Piano employed at the Louisiana Museum and in Genoa.