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Developing this piece of Bunker Hill would cost about $1 billion. The law said that 1.5% of the construction costs of new buildings had to be spent on fine-arts embellishments. Such a percentage of a billion might build a whole museum -- just. (In the end the cost of the new museum was $23 million.) So the CRA made the construction of a free museum incumbent on any developer who submitted a proposal. The city of Los Angeles gave the land, and the developer the building; total operating responsibility was reserved to MOCA. After 1983, while the Bunker Hill site was in construction, MOCA began its operations in the Temporary Contemporary, or T.C., a former police warehouse renovated to remarkable effect by Los Angeles Architect Frank Gehry.
Thus MOCA is the red cherry atop a huge and ugly sundae of realty speculation. But the building itself, designed by Tokyo-based Arata Isozaki, is a triumph, perhaps the most thoroughly felt new museum to rise in an American city since Louis Kahn's 1972 Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. Its chief exhibition spaces are under the courtyard level, lit from above by beautifully proportioned groups of pyramidal skylights. In this way Isozaki has made the subtlest possible use of Los Angeles' main natural asset, its clear and candid light. No architect in America, not even Kahn himself, has reflected more sensitively on space and natural light in their relation to works of art. Isozaki's use of materials, especially the white, curved, fused- glass paneling and the rugose red skin of Indian sandstone with which the declarative cube-and-arch geometries of the entrance block are sheathed, is wonderfully precise and just offbeat enough to keep the eye alert.
Isozaki's design did not fare smoothly at first. It fell afoul of a small group of trustees headed by Industrialist Max Palevsky, who, along with Eli Broad, put up the initial seed money for the museum -- $1 million each, spread over four years. Palevsky wanted a plain hangar of a building, as little ) "architecture" as possible. But after a two-day slugfest of a meeting, the board voted 17-3 for Isozaki, at which Palevsky resigned in a huff and sued for half his money back. But by then other key grants were in line. The "major breakthrough," according to Director Richard Koshalek, was getting Security Pacific Banker Carl Hartnack on the MOCA board. This gave MOCA real standing with the downtown business establishment, which came to see the museum's success as a necessary emblem of the economic rebirth of Bunker Hill.