Total star rating: ★★★★
The Swiss architect Peter Zumthor’s new $724m building for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) campus is finally here, and so is the moment of judgment. For nearly two decades the most devout Zumthor fans—led by the museum director Michael Govan himself—have imagined a scrupulously thoughtful, even soulful, museum environment, while others anticipated an oppressive concrete overpass built by an architect who does not know the first thing about the city.
It turns out Zumthor knows something essential—how to harness the acuity of the natural light here and the horizontality of the built landscape. Now called the David Geffen Galleries, his building is, at its best, glorious: a swooping concrete-and-glass structure that makes a stunning showcase for antiquities in particular. And it never lets you forget where you are, in one of the fast-changing cultural hubs of the centre-less city of Los Angeles.
From several points on the campus, you can see inside the new exhibition space, perched on seven legs, or “pavilions”, where restaurants, a shop, a bar and an education centre will soon be operational. From the square behind Chris Burden’s lamppost installation Urban Light (2008), you can see the red, orange, blue and green flowering forms of Henri Matisse’s 1953 ceramic mural La Gerbe, the artist’s last commission.
Exterior view southeast toward Wilshire Boulevard with Tony Smith’s Smoke (1967) in foreground, David Geffen Galleries at Lacma Art: © Tony Smith Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: © Iwan Baan
More importantly, the building invites the city inside it, with a perimeter of floor-to-ceiling windows offering views of the La Brea Tar Pits, neighbouring museums and traffic along Wilshire Boulevard. Even when deep inside one of the interior galleries, where most of the paintings and photo-sensitive objects are installed, you are just steps away from reconnecting to the cityscape and bathing in its light—beautifully modulated by the Japanese designer Reiko Sudō’s gauzy metallic curtains.
This feels very different to the great encyclopaedic museum buildings of Paris, London, New York and Chicago, where it is easy to forget where you are, let alone the time of day. Then again, Govan understood, from the moment he took the top job in 2006, that Lacma does not have a collection at that level, but one riddled by major cultural gaps.
He sees Lacma as a cluster of collections or even a cabinet of curiosities, and that is how the new museum building operates, showcasing its great Spanish religious paintings not too far from its Arts and Crafts holdings and Persian antiquities, among other strengths. These sections, which often mix mediums and periods, are loosely organised by a “four oceans” rubric.
Big and weird
All that raw concrete in the galleries plays favourites.
The Zumthor building performs beautifully when showing sculpture and decorative objects, which appear on minimalist wooden tables, platforms or in wood-trimmed display cases of the architect’s design. A long interior gallery with ultramarine-tinted walls, a Buddhist theme and a profusion of Tibetan furniture is particularly exquisite.
Objects that are sizable fare well. Those that are big and weird fare the best. The north elevators take you straight to a torso-less, six-legged, three-haunched beast made by the Los Angeles artist Liz Glynn (The Futility of Conquest, 2023) that defies logic and compels inspection. The Delhi-based artist Manjunath Kamath’s Vikatonarva (2024), a grand terracotta figure of a wild-eyed king crowned by branches sprouting miniature heads, is also full of charisma. So is a paunchy Colima earthenware dog, caught mid-bark more than 2,200 years ago, in the “Ancient Americas” section. A neo-Egyptian sphinx by the current art-star Lauren Halsey is just icing on the antiquities cake—actual mummy masks and sepulchral effigies have never looked so contemporary.
Installation view of the inaugural presentation in the David Geffen Galleries at Lacma, April 2026 Photo © Museum Associates/Lacma
All that raw concrete in the galleries plays favourites. Wood, stone, glass and clay objects tend to come alive in this environment, enacting some of the quasi-mystical, quasi-phenomenological beliefs about materiality that have long guided the Japanese movement Mono-ha’s artists, such as Kishio Suga. Zumthor’s marriage of concrete and wood also echoes Louis Kahn’s work with elemental materials at the Salk Institute in San Diego. Textiles look stunning here, offering the sensual pleasures of soft-on-hard textures.
Oil paintings do not always hold up as well. The thick, sometimes tinted, interior walls seem to work better for paintings with sturdy forms (think Paul Gauguin and Diego Rivera) than those with more delicate imagery. The blue or red tints themselves, streaky and irregular, can be distracting. How can you hang a painting on a painting?
In effect, the Zumthor building does not simply flatten the traditional, colonial museum hierarchies that privilege paintings (most of all European canvases) above, say, pottery—it inverts them. This is a museum made for things, even more than painterly representations of things.
More context, please
It would rank as a major failure if the David Geffen Galleries were the only building on the museum campus. But the Resnick Pavilion offers a flexible stage for temporary exhibitions, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum has three floors of large, white-cube-style galleries and the flamboyant shrine-like Pavilion for Japanese Art, designed by the late Bruce Goff, offers a bespoke home to Japanese scrolls, netsuke and more. This wealth of exhibition spaces drowns out the loud (but few) voices who waged a campaign against the Zumthor building for providing slightly less square footage than the decaying buildings it replaced.
Unfortunately, the museum skimped on something else. Perhaps as part of its larger project of refusing to conscript art into grand meta-narratives, Lacma has also stripped works of much specific historical and biographical context. One large table features ceramic vessels from a wide range of cultures—a sort of microcosm of the whole museum—where makers are not identified. Other artworks only have basic labels. With short panels, and one section flowing quickly into another, it is easy to have no idea what you are looking at, or why.
Installation view of the inaugural presentation in the David Geffen Galleries at Lacma, April 2026 Photo © Museum Associates/Lacma
Consider the section “Textile Conversations: Africa and Black America”, which juxtaposes five large dizzyingly patterned African-American quilts with densely patterned Kuba and Mbuti textiles from Central Africa. You will not learn from the space—or even from Lacma’s handbook—that two of the US artists, Laverne Brackens and Sherry Byrd, are mother and daughter. You will not be encouraged to think about “women’s work” or “domestic labour,” not even if you follow the QR codes. Nor will you discover anywhere that all five quilts come from a late California collector, Eli Leon, whose romantic theory that “improvisational” African American quilt-making has African roots has been discredited by recent scholars.
What the gallery delivers are wonderful textiles and obvious visual rhymes. Clearly the museum wants to let people wander and have intense experiences with art. But is there no way to provide more information and interpretation, drawing on the curators’ deep expertise? Is it not the job of museums to feed our curiosity, as well as spark it? We already have access to a rich image stream where art objects float free of context, in a manner the Surrealists would have loved: it’s called Instagram. Our visionary museums—like Lacma—could and should find ways do more.
- Member previews of the David Geffen Galleries continue until 3 May. The building opens to the public on 4 May.
- Curators: Various (45 in total)
- Tickets: $25 (concessions available
What the other critics said
In The New York Times, Michael Kimmelman calls the building “spectacular” and says the layout is one that “encourages serendipity and in which it’s [..] useful to get lost”. However, Michael J. Lewis of The Wall Street Journal views it as “maddeningly difficult to navigate” and adds: “for all its aspiration of freedom, it is a straitjacket”. Meanwhile, Edwin Heathcote in The Financial Times sees the building’s cost and sheer use of material as “anachronistic” but concludes that “the new gallery is utterly astonishing”.
