Richard Serra Michael Heizer Jeff Koons Crazy for Koons Phillips de Pury Makes Its (Small) Mark The Appendix: New Museum Scandal Edition Warhols Send Sotheby’s Soaring A Showdown for Doig at Christie’s

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The first is a 70-foot steel-and-aluminum replica of a 1943 steam locomotive that would dangle vertically over the entrance plaza from a 160-foot crane. The commission, from Jeff Koons, is projected to cost some $25 million, making it the most expensive artwork ever commissioned by a museum, easily surpassing the last work to hold that distinction, Richard Serra's 2005 sculptural installation The Matter of Time at the Guggenheim Bilbao, which cost $20 million.

Preparations including 3D scanning an original steam locomotive are still under way, LACMA director Michael Govan told the newspaper, adding that the museum will only begin raising funds when final fabrication costs have been calculated. Still, he anticipates the work will be ready in four years.

Meanwhile, the museum is also preparing a sculpture by land artist Michael Heizer that will import to the campus a giant granite boulder 22 feet high and weighing hundreds of tons. The rock will be installed on reinforced concrete rails above a ramp, and visitors will be able to walk underneath. The cost of the work, which includes the design and manufacture of a special truck to transport the boulder from a quarry 70 miles away, has not yet been determined, but prospective donors have already expressed interest, Govan says. He hopes to have the installation finished in a year.

The two works, says Govan, will "hover between sculpture and architecture and become the focal points" of the campus, "so the defining experience outside is not of giant buildings but of artworks."