Does it feel like Los Angeles has lost its nerve?
At its most effective, the city has taken outsized risks — sweeping, controversial bets that have reshaped not just its own landscape but the world’s. It built Hollywood into a global dream factory and carved a vast, paradigm-shifting freeway network. It built strange, game-changing wonders, from early Modernist archetypes to Disneyland and Disney Hall.
In the last few decades, that swagger seems to have collapsed under the weight of a tepid banality. But an unlikely hope is surfacing near the bubbling tar of prehistoric L.A.
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No L.A. institution has taken as risky a leap in this century as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. With the opening of the $724-million David Geffen Galleries, LACMA has effectively erased and reinvented itself, trading a fragmented campus core for a sinuous, hovering concrete megastructure, three football fields long, that lunges headlong across Wilshire Boulevard.
The roof of new Peter Zumthor-designed David Geffen Galleries will eventually be covered in black solar panels, part of the museum’s sustainability plan to achieve LEED Gold certification.
The result is as disorienting and austere as it is poetic and exhilarating — a living, morphing building that challenges nearly every convention of what a museum should be. This is no machine or temple for art. It has the scale of a landform and the shape of a living being. And like all living beings, it is far from perfect.
An arduous journey
The path to get here has been as serpentine as the structure itself. In 2013, shortly after the completion of a substantial LACMA redesign by architect Renzo Piano, adding the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum and Resnick Pavilion and finally restoring some degree of order and life to the campus, museum director Michael Govan — eschewing a public design process — revealed a colossal new home for its permanent collection designed by Peter Zumthor.
LACMA William Pereira original campus.
(Los Angeles County Museum of Art Archives)
Their amorphous “flower,” as they called it, inspired, in part, by the site’s oozing tar pits, would eventually lead to the demolition of everything east of its current central plaza. That includes William Pereira’s Rococo-tinged, Classical Modern pavilions (1965) and Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates’ Babylonian-scaled, belligerent Postmodern addition (1986). Zumthor and Govan had been quietly shaping the project since the latter took the reins in 2006. That was 20 years ago.
Govan, a protégé of the transformational and controversial late Guggenheim director Thomas Krens, has long collaborated with artists and designers to push the effete, glacially paced cultural establishment toward openness, spectacle and fresh territory. He’s played a part in the wildly influential adaptive reuse of Mass MoCA and Dia Beacon, the global extravaganza of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao and the more recent LACMA people magnet, “Urban Light,” by Chris Burden.
Govan’s partnership with Zumthor and, later, with structural engineer and collaborating architect Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, was about further upsetting unspoken museum-world rules — like sealed, square galleries, white walls and encyclopedic organization. It would also lean into what Zumthor likes to call “atmosphere” — a visceral feeling that emerges through the rigorous shaping of material, light, mass and space. “It’s always about emotion,” emphasized Zumthor, speaking via Zoom from his office in Haldenstein, Switzerland, the snowy Swiss Alps behind him.
Zumthor’s winding building, breathing through clusters of circular vents, like blowholes, is indeed a different kind of animal — neither precious, pretty nor polite. Eschewing the omnipresent pull of Europe, it evokes, if anything, the raw, sensual modernism of Oscar Niemeyer, the strong, untamed precolonial monoliths of South and Central America, and the organic radicalism of Bruce Goff, whose Japanese Pavilion next door looks like an older cousin.
The floor-to-ceiling windows in LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries were originally supposed to curve with the building, but mostly ended up flat — a fact that upset some critics.
A peek inside
Inside, its galleries, occupying a single, levitated floor, abandon hierarchy, chronology and even basic orientation. There’s no prescribed path, no clear beginning or end, no east or west wing. Instead, you move, self-directed, through a continuous field of art and space, where ancient and contemporary works sit side by side and sightlines slip in and out of focus.
“The building never looks down on you. It lets you find your own way,” Zumthor told me.
Walking through it means constantly recalibrating. Galleries and the art-filled spaces between them shift like openings in a cliff face, or the back alleys and squares of a village. Straight lines branch into tributaries. Some are expansive, morphing, others intimate — almost chapel-like.
Thanks to the museum’s continuous windows — divided only by thin, earth-toned bronze mullions — the view opens to the tar pits, the Hollywood Hills and — most thrillingly — traffic zooming along Wilshire Boulevard. The art “becomes part of our contemporary world,” as Zumthor put it. The bountiful, horizontal natural light holds many of the pieces in a soft glow, continually shifting depending on your position or the time of day.
The building bends you around corners, compresses you and rarely lets you settle. At times I lost my bearings. I doubled back. I wondered where I was, what I had missed. But I also found myself curiously wandering, looking more closely, making connections I might not have otherwise.
That seems to be the trade-off. I think it’s worth it.
The galleries, their flat upper and lower slabs supported by complex webs of concrete ribs and post-tensioned steel cables, are pure structure—no appliqué, no columns. You begin to grasp the scope of LACMA’s collection within through a slow awareness of the whole. The collection, which will be updated regularly — the premier installation is loosely organized around oceanic regions — now feels less like a series of isolated departments and more like a continuous conversation.
The interior of LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries features floor-to-ceiling windows, many clad in specially designed, light-diffusing curtains. There is also an outer walking path that rings the entirety of the building, and clusters of windowless galleries within.
When I visited last June, before the art was installed, I left with several concerns. I worried that the bracingly irregular, board-formed concrete, which resulted in streaked lines on walls, bubbly, scarred triangles on ceilings, fissures on dark floors — none of it as honed as Zumthor’s past work— would read as sloppy, even unfinished. But with the galleries now in place, that same coarseness has become a powerful foil to LACMA’s pristine, priceless treasures.
In this new context, color deepens, texture registers and impact heightens. The frenetic concrete engages with each piece, rather than being a static, inert backdrop. Zumthor noted that the surface is the work of hundreds of craftsmen, manually spreading a muddy mixture inside and out — leaving mistakes when they happen. “What we need today is not refinement. We need wholehearted directness coming out of the hand,” said Zumthor.
Govan has said he hopes the concrete will age and crack, recording time rather than resisting it. (What a concept in this city obsessed with the opposite!) The interior spaces can be heavy, raw, even a little unsettling. But that emotional charge is a welcome reprieve from the controlled calm and pristine sheet-rock neutrality of so many contemporary museums and galleries.
The building ties LACMA to Los Angeles in unexpected ways. Its low, sweeping form recalls the city’s otherworldly infrastructure and its relentless ribbons of roads. And the exposed perimeter makes it possible to navigate by the city itself: a glimpse of mountains, a flash of Wilshire, helping you regain your bearings. There are even spots to get great views of the building from the building.
Another pleasant surprise is textile artist Reiko Sudō’s pleated, metal-laced curtains lining some of the galleries — part of the Geffen’s complex push and pull with natural illumination. They introduce a poetic softness, catching and refining light, glowing as the sun shifts and adding texture, depth and a sense of movement. They create a sort of impressionist veil, abstracting the city and emphasizing the building’s ongoing dialogue with its setting
The enclosed galleries that populate the building’s center, even those without cracks of light piercing their upper edges, don’t resemble oppressive cells, as I had also feared. Softened with bluish, reddish or blackish pigment, these spaces, which Zumthor calls “houses,” feel like contemplative retreats — a frozen respite from the cacophony outside.
I don’t miss the touchable, handcrafted details featured in many of Zumthor’s buildings — the omnipresent concrete is the detail. And I’m not as bothered as I feared that some of the curved frontages are inset with flat glass — but I still find that detail clunky and incongruent. And, despite the vociferous protests of many, I’m fine that the gallery space measures 10,000 square feet less than the buildings razed to accommodate it. If anything, the reduced footprint makes the collection feel more connected and less overwhelming.
An evolving exterior
The building, its former campus once a walled-off fort, finally acknowledges its neighbors. Hoisting itself almost 30 feet above the landscape on seven partially glazed, programmed pavilions, including a restaurant, cafe, store and education center, it connects directly to Hancock Park and the tar pits, while carving out its own uniquely shaped public spaces. The zones directly underneath the behemoth don’t feel like dark warrens, as I feared. But it is odd to see a few spots requiring lighting during the daytime. The most effective is the Wilshire underpass, with constellation lighting intentionally conflating day and night.
Just as important, the building bends around its surroundings — curving past the tar pits as if in deference. In doing so, it frames a series of striking views from the ground, especially a curving vista of its Goff-designed relative across the site.
Still, the exterior is also where the project feels less resolved.
LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries bridge Wilshire Boulevard from the north to south, creating symbolic unity between two sides of a thoroughfare marked by a variety cultures and ethnicities.
1. The exterior of the David Geffen Galleries. 2. A crew installs artwork at the David Geffen Galleries.
The ground plane often reads as hard and unforgiving. Despite the building itself acting as an impressive solar shield thanks to its almost comically large, cantilevered concrete crown, there is still not enough shade, not enough trees — a familiar Los Angeles misstep. (No matter what Govan says, I still don’t think palm trees do the trick.)
The structure’s severity turns against itself in places like the large plazas to the north, which for now feel like back-of-house spaces. Without the softening of art — or enough greenery and activity — the concrete behemoth, which at its best feels soulful, quirky and mesmerizing, can feel hard, bleak and ponderous. As the amorphous building weaves through the neighborhood, this line between elegance and unfriendliness shifts depending on where you are. Gazing from “Urban Light,” it sings, rhythmic and resolved. From Wilshire just east of the structure, it feels institutional, slammed down on the city.
Govan has long used public art to create buzz and draw people in. The new campus dramatically expands that ambition, often successfully — but not always. Pedro Reyes has created a cheeky, anthropomorphic reminder of the building’s primeval heart. Tony Smith’s “Smoke” meets the building’s scale and provides a poignant marker of where Pereira’s grand atrium once loomed. Alexander Calder‘s “Three Quintains (Hello Girls)” provides color and movement, its curved black reflecting pool a playful nod to the adjacent tar pits.
Alexander Calder’s fountain, “Three Quintains (Hello Girls),” is one of many public sculptures that can be viewed on LACMA’s new campus, which has 3.5 acres of park space.
But some installations feel harsh, dwarfed or forgotten. Mariana Castillo Deball’s “Feathered Changes,” which spreads across the ground beneath much of the building through the astounding hand manipulation of toned cement, presents a fascinating exploration of Mesoamerican myths and mystery. But it seems to privilege concept over comfort. Its hard, exposed surface offers little relief from sun or heat.
Jeff Koons’ wide-eyed topiary creature “Split-Rocker” feels, for now, marooned on the other side of Wilshire. The entire south extension of the site, which will soon host a theater, bar and plaza, is still unfinished, but currently acts like the back door that Govan and Zumthor explicitly wanted to avoid when they first presented their “flower.” That may change, as the landscaping fills out and the area gains art. In fact, all of the Geffen’s public spaces are still works in progress — unlike the fixed concrete gallery walls inside — so there is still room for improvement.
There are other concerns. The galleries are aiming for LEED Gold certification, and plans are afoot to install a field of black solar panels on the roof. But the heavy reliance on concrete carries an undeniable environmental cost. And with so many hard surfaces inside, one wonders whether sound will bounce and build, turning the galleries from quietly immersive to unnervingly loud.
Other questions keep crossing my mind, which only time will answer: Will Geffen’s imposing size and height put off potential visitors? Will LACMA restore the food and drink offerings directly on Piano’s central covered plaza, which helped make it the scrappy heart of the museum, and in some respects, the neighborhood? And will the museum’s demolition of its entire historic core embolden officials or developers elsewhere to turn to the bulldozer first?
Boldness still matters
Despite these questions, Zumthor and Govan’s David Geffen Galleries are a stunning achievement. In an era of safe, polished museums, LACMA has made a building that is alive — imperfect, challenging, changing and open to interpretation — and therefore, thoroughly modern.
Some of its aims fall short. The roughness occasionally slips into crudeness, the scale into overbearing, the landscape into starkness. Govan and Zumthor’s scorched-earth, top-down design process has alienated many passionate art and architecture fans and members of the public. But the central idea — a museum that rejects hierarchy, embraces ambiguity and engages Los Angeles — holds.
And that matters. In a city that has recently traded bold experimentation for caution, the David Geffen Galleries — not to mention the new subway stop across the street — herald an evolving, visionary metropolis, and stand as a reminder that risk and ambition are still possible, and more important than ever.
LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries are named after the music mogul who made a $150-million donation to the building’s fundraising campaign in 2017 — the largest single cash gift from an individual in the institution’s history.
