concrete

Iran’s president has urged Muslim nations to sever ties with Israel – although it remains unclear whether the summit’s measures will go that far.

Doha, Qatar – Foreign dignitaries from across the Arab and Muslim world have gathered in Doha, and observers are expecting them to deliver a decisive response to Israel after its attack on Qatar.

The emergency summit of the Arab League and Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) opens on Monday, a day after foreign ministers from the participating states met behind closed doors in Doha to hammer out a draft resolution proposing concrete measures against Israel.

Fury has swept across the region since Israel’s strikes on Tuesday, which killed five Hamas members and a Qatari security officer, missing a Hamas negotiation team that was meeting in Doha to weigh a United States proposal to end Israel’s genocidal two-year war on Gaza.

At the session on Sunday, Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani slammed Israel’s attack, noting that he had regional support for taking measures to protect Qatar’s sovereignty.

“We appreciate the solidarity of brotherly Arab and Islamic countries and friendly countries from the international community that condemned this barbaric Israeli attack,” Mohammed said, adding that Qatar intended to take “legitimate legal measures … to preserve the sovereignty of our country”.

Possible avenues of action

Pakistani Foreign Minister Mohammad Ishaq Dar underlined the importance of the summit reaching a “clear roadmap … to deal with this situation”, telling Al Jazeera’s Osama Bin Javaid that the world’s Muslims “would be all eyeing this summit, waiting to see what comes out of it”.

Two days after the Israeli attack on Doha, Pakistani Defence Minister Muhammad Asif warned that firm action was required in response to Israel and no country should think it would remain untouched by the Gaza war.

Speaking to Bin Javaid, Ishaq Dar echoed the sentiment, criticising the lack of results from United Nations Security Council discussions.

Asked what practical measures could be pursued, he said: “I think they’ve [Arab countries] already talked on these lines. It’s a sort of combined security force type,” adding, “A nuclear-powered Pakistan obviously would stand as a member of the Ummah [community of Muslim believers]. It will discharge its duty.”

For his part, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian called on Muslim nations to sever ties with Israel.

“Islamic countries can sever ties with this fake regime and maintain unity and cohesion,” Pezeshkian said before departing for Doha, adding that he hoped for a decision on measures against Israel.

Some analysts said the summit, which ends on Monday evening, could yield concrete measures against Israel for the first time.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new Peter Zumthor-designed David Geffen Galleries are alive with sound and activity. Voices echo through the vast, concrete space and a cacophony of drills and electric lifts beep, buzz and blare. A unique colored glaze is being applied to gallery walls, and paintings and photos are being installed throughout.

That gritty whir? It’s the Hilti TE 4-22 cordless rotary hammer drill. “A very fine product,” says senior art preparator Michael Price with a sly smile. He’s been drilling holes in the concrete walls with the large red contraption, which comes with a small attached vacuum that sucks up concrete dust as it penetrates the wall. The work is simple and done in a matter of seconds.

Senior art preparator Michael Price drills into concrete walls to hang art in LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries. He jokingly calls the Hilti TE 4-22 cordless rotary hammer drill “a very fine product.”

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Some of the first holes were drilled a little more than a week ago for the installation of a photo sculpture LACMA commissioned for its entrance by Los Angeles-born artist Todd Gray, titled “Octavia Butler’s Gaze.” Last Wednesday, Gray, along with LACMA director and Chief Executive Michael Govan and curator Britt Salvesen, watched the final panel of the 27-foot-long assemblage being hoisted onto the wall and put in place using wooden cleats that fit together much like a jigsaw puzzle.

“This is another thing that concrete makes possible,” says Salvesen, the head of the photography, and prints and drawings, departments, noting with satisfaction how flush the photographs sit against the wall. “The traditional sheetrock drywall used in many museums have been painted and repainted so many times, they’re not exactly pristine when it comes to leveling.”

Gray steps back and looks at the finished product, nodding with quiet pride. The L.A. native attended Hamilton High School and CalArts and felt deeply honored to have been tapped for a permanent commission. He was therefore among the first people to take a hard-hat tour of the building when it was under construction so he could familiarize himself with the space. The new building opens in April 2026.

“I was kind of overwhelmed,” Gray says. “I had never been in an architectural space like this so I was just really curious. But I must admit, I was much more concerned about this wall.”

The wall is big — a blank, concrete slate — and Gray’s piece will be the first work of art guests see when they walk up the broad staircase leading to the new galleries. In Butler’s portrait, which Gray took in the 1990s, the influential writer looks contemplatively off into the distance — whether near or far, one can’t be sure. Her expression is unreadable, at once thoughtful, curious, interested and detached.

A portrait of Octavia Butler, taken by Todd Gray in the 1990s, anchors the 27-foot-long photo sculpture commissioned by LACMA for the entrance of its new David Geffen Galleries.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Her face is in a gold, oval frame and the viewer’s eyes follow hers to other aspects of the piece — an assemblage of large and small photos taken by Gray in places around the world, including Versailles, Norway and Ghana. It includes an image of an idyllic-looking path through bright green foliage that leads to a slave castle in Cape Coast, Ghana. There is also a striking image of stars in the cosmos, a lovely fresco from a church in Rome, a picture of traditional sculpture housed at the AfricaMuseum in Belgium and a series of stoic Greek columns.

“A lot of my work is contesting art history, or talking about art history, or photography’s place in history, my history, various histories culturally,” said Gray, explaining why he likes that LACMA’s collection will not be exhibited chronologically, or by medium or region, but rather in a series of interwoven exhibits that connect vastly different art in dialogue. “So it was really a commission made in heaven.”

The new galleries, explained Govan, will focus on “migration and intersection, rather than American art over on one side of the museum and European art in a different wing.”

Gray’s photo sculpture, for example, will be adjacent to a gallery featuring African art and near another with Latin American art.

It will also be directly across from a floor-to-ceiling window. These giant windows are a key part of Zumthor’s design — and a flash point for controversy, with critics arguing that too much sunlight could harm fragile art.

Translucent curtains are being designed for some of the windows, but won’t be used throughout, and not in the entrance across from “Octavia’s Gaze.” For that reason, Gray said he employed a relatively new technique called UV direct printing that was developed for outdoor signage. The process involves intense ultraviolet lights that cure and harden the ink, ultimately searing it into the printing material. These prints won’t fade, Gray said.

Todd Gray, left, oversees the installation of his photo sculpture “Octavia Butler’s Gaze.” The piece used a new UV printing technology to ensure it won’t fade in the sunlight coming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows across from it.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Delicate and old art will not be put at risk by light, Govan said. The interior of Zumthor’s building is dotted with boxy, windowless galleries that Govan and Zumthor call “houses.” And like houses, the interior of galleries are being treated to color — not in the form of paint, however.

Zumthor conceived of three colors that he wanted used in the galleries, explained Diana Magaloni, senior deputy director for conservation, curatorial and exhibitions, who has been mixing the glazes and working with a team of four trained artists to apply them. The colors are a reddish black, a Renaissance ultramarine blue and a blackish burgundy that Zumthor hoped would conjure a cave-like dimness. Overall, Magaloni said, Zumthor wanted the color to look as if it were emerging from darkness.

There are 27 galleries and the colors will be divided by section: Nine on the south side are red, nine on the north side are black and the nine in the middle are blue.

The glazing technique was conceived by a friend of Zumthor’s who lives in Switzerland, and LACMA is currently the only organization to employ it, Magaloni said.

Pigments made of minerals including hematite and rocks like lapis lazuli are ground into nanoparticles and suspended in silica, resembling “melted glass,” as Magaloni describes. The glaze is then applied to the walls, a process that must be done at once in order to prevent any impression of brushstrokes, and also because the glaze hardens quickly. Once it’s dry, the team applies a second coat of glaze pigment infused with black carbon nanoparticles. The effect is dark and mottled — it looks as if the concrete has swallowed the color.

“The concrete has all this life in and of itself,” said Magaloni. “You can walk through the building and you can see that those surfaces are not really homogeneous. The material expresses itself with no artifice, and we wanted to preserve that.”

Painting the concrete would erase that life, she added.

A gallery blushing in a deep wine color, with the theme of “Leisure and Labor in the American Metropolis,” is almost ready. Work by George Bellows, James Van Der Zee, Mary Cassatt and Robert Henri adorn the walls, and there is a table ready to receive a Tiffany lamp. Govan points out that such paintings would not have been originally displayed on white walls but rather on walls of richly colored fabric.

“She’s asking you something,” Todd Gray said of his portrait of Octavia Butler.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Gray’s piece will also be in dialogue with this room, calling to it from another time and place — asking viewers to turn their gaze to history, slavery, transcendence, salvation, power and so much more.

At this moment in time, when arts institutions are grappling with the implications of the Trump administration’s claim that the Smithsonian Institution presents “divisive, race-centered ideology” and vow to monitor what other museums around the country are putting on display, Gray’s piece feels like a small bit of resistance.

“She’s asking you something,” Gray says of Butler.

The answer is yours to declare.

Benjamin Sesko tops the summer’s transfer targets, with striker’s club Leipzig revealing ‘concrete interest’.

Premier League sides Manchester United and Newcastle have both placed competing bids for in-demand RB Leipzig striker Benjamin Sesko, German tabloid Bild reported Tuesday.

Bild said the Red Devils made an initial bid of 85 million euros ($98.2) on Tuesday for the 22-year-old centre forward.

Newcastle had offered a reported 80 million euros ($92.4) for the striker on Saturday, upping that to 85 million ($98.2) with bonuses on Monday.

The Slovenian striker scored 13 goals and laid on five assists in a disappointing league campaign for Leipzig last season. He has scored 16 times in 41 appearances at the international level.

Sesko was stood down from Saturday’s home friendly against Serie A side Atalanta, won 2-1 by the visitors, due to a potential transfer.

Leipzig sporting director Marcel Schafer confirmed this, saying Sesko would not play “due to the very concrete interests from several clubs”.

United are rebuilding after their worst top-flight campaign in 51 years, along with defeat to Tottenham in the Europa League final.

United were toothless in attack and have already brought in forwards Matheus Cunha and Bryan Mbeumo in the summer window.

Sesko’s arrival could push under-pressure striker Rasmus Hojlund towards the exit, with reports emerging that United could sell the Denmark forward for 35 million ($40.4) euros, less than half of what they paid to bring him from Atalanta in 2023.

Newcastle qualified for the Champions League with a fifth-placed finish last season, but are reportedly in danger of losing striker Alexander Isak to Premier League champions Liverpool.

Campaigners hoping to convert a disused railway line into England’s longest cycle and pedestrian tunnel are challenging a government decision to fill much of the historic structure with concrete.

Earlier this month ministers decided to award several million pounds to permanently shutter the Queensbury tunnel built in the 1870s for a railway between Halifax and Keighley in West Yorkshire, despite spending £7.2m to shore up the structure less than four years ago.

The government has agreed to fund plans to infill the tunnel for safety reasons, by the roads agency, National Highways (NH), which is responsible for maintaining the historic railways estate.

The decision comes after the agency was widely criticised for “cultural vandalism” over the infilling of Victorian bridges on the railway estate. In 2023 it was forced to reverse burying in concrete a Victorian bridge in Great Musgrave, Cumbria, on the route of a scheme to join two heritage railway lines.

The mayor of West Yorkshire, Tracy Brabin, who backed calls to reopen the 1.4-mile tunnel which was closed to railway in 1956, has expressed disappointment at the government’s decision. In 2021, while standing at the entrance of the tunnel, she described plans for a subterranean cycle path linking Bradford and Keighley to Halifax as a “great facility for our community.”

Campaigners accused the government of “investing in destruction” and ignoring the views of 8,000 planning objections to the plan to infill the tunnel. They are due to meet Lilian Greenwood, the minister for the future of roads, next week to urge her to reverse the decision.

In a letter to campaigners, Greenwood said converting the tunnel for cycling would be too costly in “the challenging fiscal environment” and that “safety risks need to be addressed.”

NH’s contractors estimate it would cost £26.4m to convert the tunnel. But campaigners have dismissed this figure as “gold-plated” and claim the tunnel could be brought back into use as a greenway for only £13.7m – not much more than the £7.2m spent to shore it up from 2018 to 2021 including at least £3.3m now required to infill the structure.

They also point to a study by the charity Sustrans published earlier this year which found the proposed route would generate £3 in social, economic and tourism benefits for every £1 spent on it.

Norah McWilliam, the leader of the Queensbury Tunnel Society, said: “The government is making and investment in destruction to satisfy the needs of a roads body that only cares about its own narrow interests. Community aspirations to bring positive benefits from our fabulous historic asset mean nothing to these spreadsheet shufflers.”

She added: “These new millions and the seven lost in a black hole four years ago could have paid for the tunnel’s repair, safeguarding it for a role at the heart of an inspiring and sustainable active travel network – something Bradford and West Yorkshire could be proud of.”

Graeme Bickerdike, the engineering coordinator for the society, said: “The minister claims that her decision is based on a ‘full view of the facts’, but the evidence seems to have come exclusively from National Highways which has a proven track record for exaggerating risk, misrepresenting condition evidence and frittering away public funds.

“There is no justification for another costly tunnel intervention at this time as the 2018-21 works have reduced what was already a low risk profile.”

Brabin said she shared the disappointment of campaigners, but said she understood the government’s decision. She said: “To ensure everyone’s safety the government had to act quickly to secure the site, and the realities of public finances meant a difficult decision needed to be made.

“We remain committed to helping support alternative routes for walking, wheeling and cycling between Bradford and Calderdale.”

Ever since Brutalist architecture emerged in the 1950s, the style has been polarizing. Concrete might be gray, but public response rarely enters into gray areas. The buildings’ raw, unfinished concrete forms, typically simple, are loved or hated.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is nearing completion of its own new Brutalist building, designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, 82, to house the permanent collection of paintings, sculptures and other works of art. For three days and one evening, beginning July 3, museum members will get a sneak peek at the empty interior spaces of the David Geffen Galleries. The fully finished project, with art installed, doesn’t open until April 2026.

Concrete is not eco-friendly, either in production or in results like heat magnification, and some celebrated architects with a social justice bent refuse to use it. But its visual power is undeniable — a strength of the huge Zumthor design. His poured-in-place concrete gobbles 347,500 square feet, including 110,000 square feet in 90 exhibition galleries and corridors lofted 30 feet above ground atop seven massive piers, crossing Wilshire Boulevard.

Some of my favorite art museum buildings are Brutalist in design, like Marcel Breuer’s fortress-like former Whitney in New York (1966), and Louis Kahn’s refined classicism at the Kimbell in Fort Worth (1972). Brad Cloepfil’s Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, which may be the best new American museum built for art in the last 15 years, uses concrete brilliantly to illuminate Still’s rugged painting motifs. Zumthor’s Geffen doesn’t come close.

I’ve written a lot about the long-aborning LACMA project over the last dozen years, focused on the design’s negative impact on the museum program, but that’s now baked in. (The museum pegs the building cost at $720 million, but sources have told me the entire project cost is closer to $835 million.) L.A.’s encyclopedic museum, with a global permanent collection simply installed geographically as straightforward chronology, is dead, and the Geffen Galleries prevent it from ever coming back. Changing theme shows drawn from the collection, curatorially driven, are the new agenda.

Horrizontal light enters from floor-to-ceiling windows around the perimeter of Peter Zumthor’s LACMA design.

(Iwan Baan)

Having theme galleries is like banishing the alphabet that organizes the encyclopedia on your shelf. Chronology and geography are not some imperialistic scheme dominating global art. They just make finding things in a sprawling encyclopedic art collection easy for visitors. Good luck with that now.

I’ve pretty much avoided consideration of the building’s aesthetics. The exception was a 2013 column responding to “The Presence of the Past,” a somewhat clumsy exhibition of Zumthor’s still-evolving design conception, which has changed greatly in the final form. Reviewing purpose-built architecture is a fool’s errand when you can’t experience the purpose — impossible for another 10 months, when the art-installed Geffen opens.

A press event Thursday allowed entry into the gallery spaces, however, so a few things are now obvious. One is that museum galleries are theatrical spaces — there’s a reason they’re called shows — and chances are you’ve never seen so much concrete in one place. Sometimes it’s sleek and appealing, sometimes splotchy and cracked. (Surface mottling could soften over time.) But across floors, walls and ceilings of 90 bunker-like rooms and long, meandering corridors, the limitless concrete is monotonous. Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” meets Beckett’s theater of the absurd.

Another is that views from the floor-to-ceiling windows that surround the building will offer lovely, interesting city vistas — welcome relief from the monotony. (Curtains will be installed around the perimeter.) A third is that the light, some entering horizontally from the side windows and a couple thin clerestory slots, but much of it from fixed vertical ceiling cans, is going to be a problem.

Those windows are also one of the biggest design losses in the value-engineering, undertaken to control ballooning costs. (Adjusted for inflation, the original Whitney Museum’s construction cost per square foot was about $633, Kimbell’s was about $469, and LACMA clocks in at $1,400, according to its website. Brutalist, indeed.) The floor plate was originally planned to follow the organic curves of the ceiling plate, with continuous, hugely expensive curved-glass windows linking the two. Now the floor plan is largely rectilinear.

The glass panels had to be flat, so the composition is a bit more dynamic. But the roofline overlaps can be jarring. At one end the hovering curved roof looks like a pizza too big for the box below.

All surfaces of 90 bunker-like galleries are concrete, with plans for drilling holes and pounding in anchors to hang art.

(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)

Also daunting: Art will be hung on all that concrete by drilling holes in the walls and pounding in anchors. Moving the art will be cumbersome, requiring concrete patching. The entire process is labor-intensive and expensive.

Zumthor is the sixth architect to have had a whack at LACMA, following earlier efforts by William L. Pereira, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, Bruce Goff, Rem Koolhaas, and Renzo Piano. Koolhaas never got beyond the proposal stage, although his marvelous idea pioneered the teardown-then-build-a-pavilion-on-stilts plan now coming to very different fruition. Only Goff produced a notable building, with a novel Japanese Pavilion that conceptually turned inside out the spiral Guggenheim Museum by his mentor, Frank Lloyd Wright. (Happily, the Japanese Pavilion can now be seen from the street.) The rest were mostly meh, salted with an occasional ugh.

Zumthor and LACMA Director Michael Govan pronounce the new Geffen building to be “a concrete sculpture,” which is why it’s being shown empty now. The cringey claim is grandiose, and it makes one wonder why being architecture is not enough. If it’s true, it’s the only monumental sculpture I know that has a couple of restaurants, an auditorium and a store. Apparently, an artistic hierarchy exists, with sculpture ranked above architecture.

That’s odd, because we’ve also been repeatedly told that LACMA built the place to undermine such conceits. Museum officials are still banging away on the absurd claim that a single-story building for art, banishing distinctions between “upstairs/downstairs,” confers an egalitarian marker on what global cultures produce. Hierarchy, however, is not a matter of physicality or direction, but of conceptual status. Rosa Parks was riding on a single-level bus, not a double-decker, and she knew exactly what her mighty refusal to sit in the back meant.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

LACMA should be half as savvy. Climb the 60-plus steps up to the Geffen Galleries, or take an elevator, and when you arrive some art will be out front and some out back. Surely, we won’t regard that front/back difference as anti-egalitarian.

Will the Geffen Galleries be successful? My crystal ball is broken, but I see no reason why it won’t be a popular attraction. And that is clearly the museum’s priority.

An urban environment with a talented architect’s unusual art museum design tagged by a monumental topiary sculpture on the main drag — that’s a description of Frank Gehry’s incomparable Guggenheim Bilbao, the great 1997 museum in Basque northern Spain, where Jeff Koons’ marvelous floral “Puppy” sculpture holds court out front. (Every palace needs topiary, a leafy green power emblem of culture’s control over nature; Koons’ 40-foot-tall West Highland white dog makes for an especially cuddly symbol of guardianship.) Now the description fits LACMA too.

The museum just announced the acquisition of Koons’ floral behemoth, “Split-Rocker,” a rather bland hobby horse topiary that merges a toy dinosaur’s head with the hobby horse’s head. LACMA is next door to the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum, and the kiddie dino, a natural history plaything, forces a shotgun wedding with a degraded example of art history’s triumphant motif of a man on a horse. Govan worked on Bilbao before coming to L.A., and the formula there is being repeated here. L.A.’s eye-grabbing building won’t be as great nor its Instagram-ready topiary be nearly as good as the Bilbao ensemble, but when does lightning strike twice?

As museums, Bilbao and LACMA couldn’t be more different. One has a small, mostly mediocre permanent collection of contemporary art, while the other has a large, often excellent permanent collection of global art from all eras. The so-called Bilbao Effect sent cultural tourism, then already on the rise, skyrocketing. With the David Geffen Galleries, LACMA has put its very expensive eggs in that tourism basket.

Guests walks across part of the new building that spans Wilshire Boulevard.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

It might take some time to work. The U.S. is the world’s largest travel and tourism sector, but it’s the only one forecast by the World Travel & Tourism Council to see international visitor decline in 2025 — and probably beyond. Between erratic pandemic recovery and an abusive federal government hostile to foreigners, worries are growing in L.A. about the imminent soccer World Cup and the Olympics.

It’s also surprising that the museum is now bleeding critical senior staff, just as LACMA’s lengthy transformation from a civic art museum into a tourist destination trembles on the verge of completion. Previously unreported, chief operating officer Diana Vesga is already gone, deputy director for curatorial and exhibitions J. Fiona Ragheb recently left, and chief financial officer Mark Mitchell departs next week.

Those are three top-tier institutional positions. Let’s hope they don’t know something we also don’t know.