If you go to the newly opened David Geffen wing of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), I recommend you head there later in the afternoon, when the sun is a little lower on the horizon. When I first visited at 11am, the sun was directly overhead, and Peter Zumthor’s highly anticipated $724 million, 110,000 sq ft new building struck me as a dismal, dated, inelegant brute. But when I came back at 4pm, I came to a wildly different conclusion: in that more flattering light, I saw a brilliant innovation and true gift to the city. I think both visions can be true.
Commissioned by LACMA director Michael Govan 20 years ago, Zumthor was tasked with replacing an existing 1965 William Pereira building as the home of the encyclopedic museum’s permanent collection. In 2019, the city approved Zumthor’s plan to elevate an amoeba-shaped single storey high above the ground, with sinuous walls of floor-to-ceiling glass that would span Wilshire Boulevard like a bridge. Over the years, the design evolved in the face of various obstacles, including the diversion of time and budget towards removing fossils that were discovered on site, plus the realities of American construction at this scale. Best known for the material sensitivity and rigour of his often preciously small European projects, Zumthor publicly lamented how his design had been essentialised in the process. ‘There are no Zumthor details any more,’ he told The New York Times in a 2023 interview. (Although more recently, he’s disavowed this disavowal.)
At 900ft long, the finished building has no particularly beautiful angles from the outside. Where Zumthor’s renderings featured delicately curving glass and sandy-coloured stone, reality delivered windows framed in conspicuously thick bronze with more corners than curves, sandwiched between a pair of oppressively dark, remarkably flat concrete slabs. On the interior, the same sombre concrete forms the load-bearing walls of 26 standalone galleries that look like bunkers. At the top of the entrance’s 30ft-tall outdoor stairs (optional; there are also elevators), I wondered how I ended up in a basement.
At 11am, in the shadow of concrete eaves, the 360-degree windows cast a pallid light on the interiors and a glare on the vitrines. Among 21st-century museums, glass walls are a popular gesture of public-facing transparency, and in LA, a familiar feature of domestic space. But here they could’ve been used more discerningly. The view over Wilshire Boulevard is nice, like standing on a quintessential LA overpass, or the mezzanine in LACMA’s permanent collection above Metropolis II (2010), Chris Burden's kinetic sculpture of whizzing toy cars. Then the bridge ends with an anticlimactic, panoramic view of a nearby apartment complex’s stucco.
But just like LA public life, the building really starts to come alive in the later afternoon. During these magic hours, golden rays enter the museum horizontally, warming and brightening the concrete. The curtains become luminous, casting stripes of light and shadow on the floor. Suddenly, everyone’s complexion looks amazing.
Just like LA public life, the building really starts to come alive in the later afternoon
The Geffen wing is the brilliant reinvention of the museum that LACMA says it is: exhibitions are porous and make use of every wall, both inside enclosed galleries and the interstitial, oddly shaped spaces in between. Not every feature, however, is precisely as described. The press release highlights Govan’s desire to exhibit the history of the world on a single, non-hierarchal plane, where Zumthor’s amorphous floorplan invites free-form exploration. The inaugural hang defines regions around bodies of water rather than by continent, a particularly beautiful way of repositioning ourselves in the world. Hierarchies, however, are inevitable. Some galleries are designed for more traffic than others. The entrance is positioned to send visitors down the long, linear hall facing Wilshire, where their first encounters are with Greek and Roman sculpture. Mounted right at the centre, for all of Wilshire Boulevard to see, top billing goes to Francis Bacon’s famed Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969), a gift from the late mega-collector Elaine Wynn.
Where the museum purports to have no prescribed circulation paths, I disagree. This is an architecture that pulls and confounds, directing towards seductively framed views. Different pathways approach the same gallery from such remarkably different angles that you are drawn back into spaces you’ve already seen. One Mediterranean gallery seems to have an inexplicable gravitational pull. At the intersection of the Ottoman, Spanish and North African corridors, it forms a vortex where visitors often ask, ‘Weren’t we just in here?’ I asked a guard if he could point to our location on a map, and he said, ‘Good question.’
The joy is very much in getting lost. Zumthor intended for the interiors to feel like a walk through a forest, but I would say the dilation and contraction of the space feels more like a medieval town’s narrow streets and town squares. Overall, the building feels very familiar, local and correct. It adopts local vernacular architecture to a museum scale and animates visitors with recurring moments of awe. Alongside the sweeping vistas of sunset over Hancock Park, the aforementioned stucco apartments actually feel perfectly appropriate. The architecture is embedded with metaphors of taking a second look in a different light. It’s a tour through the truth of LA, both its banalities and grandeur. After many years of demolition and construction, complaints and delays, LACMA has finally come home.