A Stunning New LACMA Descends Upon a City in Crisis
When the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened its doors, in the spring of 1965, L.A. was a young city in the midst of transforming itself into a cultural capital, with the buildings and institutions to prove it. The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion had just opened; the Mark Taper Forum and the Ahmanson Theatre would soon follow. With the Watts riots still several months in the future, the city, as far as anyone knew, was ascendant.
To create a dedicated space for art—which had previously been tucked in with the dinosaur bones at the Natural History Museum—the county allocated a ten-acre site, next to the La Brea Tar Pits, along Wilshire Boulevard, at a midway point between downtown and the beach. LACMA was to be Los Angeles’s own Metropolitan Museum of Art, an encyclopedic institution to house world-historical objects cajoled from omnivorous collectors like William Randolph Hearst. William Pereira, the local architect selected (over Ludwig Mies van der Rohe) to design the campus, delivered three structures sheathed in chipped white marble, set around a fountain in which Alexander Calder’s tripartite mobile “Hello Girls” frolicked, when the spouts were working, which they usually weren’t.
What a disappointment! “It is—or could have been—an important building, the largest art museum built in the U.S. in 25 years and located in a city second only to New York in importance and second to none in growth and vitality,” the editors of Arts & Architecture wrote. They proceeded to eviscerate the design: the galleries were cramped, the lights cast doubling shadows, and the narrow columns made it look like an office building, of the kind admired by Howard Ahmanson, the project’s lead patron. Other critics agreed: LACMA was superficially trite and substantially dysfunctional. “The total impact is singularly oppressive,” the art critic for the Saturday Review lamented.
Sixty-one years later, how quaint that complaint seems: one poorly conceived arts complex in a city that seemed bound for glory. The L.A. of 2026 is a more mature and more troubled metropolis, certain of its importance but uncertain of its long-term stability. After eighteen months of crisis that saw historic urban fires, harassment by federal immigration authorities, and the generalized anxiety that attends a place where rents are high and services low, public transit inadequate and gas prices insane, the city’s vitality is flagging. Growth is negative, and those still here are deeply unsatisfied, more so than at any time in the decade-plus since U.C.L.A. started collecting data on the subject.
It is for this Los Angeles that the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor has designed a building that is both futuristic and primordial. A great gray swish spanning Wilshire Boulevard, the new LACMA opened to the public in May. It calls to mind a spaceship loaded with several thousand artifacts representative of life on Earth, ready to leave this torn-up planet for a new frontier. It’s a winning building, ambitious, frank, and generous, with soulful poured-in-place raw-concrete walls, and acres of natural light illuminating the art, often without the intervention of vitrines or heavy-handed wall texts. There is ample space for contemplation and surprise.
Zumthor, who is eighty-three and lives in a remote Alpine village, was an esoteric—and controversial—choice of architect for a large-scale public project. (I wrote about Zumthor, and the debate surrounding the building, in 2020.) His work is highly personal and idiosyncratic, and includes a thermal spa, a field chapel dedicated to a Swiss mystic, and a monument to suspected witches burned at the stake in seventeenth-century Norway. He designs from the inside out. “It starts with the intention to create emotional space,” he has said. “I don’t set out to do a beautiful object that you look at from the outside. . . . I’m looking for architecture space, and architecture space, as we know, is a void. . . . I want to design something that doesn’t exist.”
The need to redevelop the LACMA campus was undisputed: even one of the project’s architects endorsed the idea of demolition, not long after construction was complete. In 2001, an international competition was held, resulting in a Rem Koolhaas design; by 2003, the plan, which failed to attract meaningful support from donors, had been abandoned. Then, in 2006, Michael Govan was hired as director and chief executive officer of LACMA. This time, there would be no competition or public process. Govan hand-selected Zumthor, and then set about persuading the county, which dedicated a hundred and twenty-five million dollars in taxpayer money, and the donor class, which provided the rest, to trust his pick.
Zumthor had never worked in the United States. At LACMA, he was tasked with making a public building in an American megacity, a place of thrilling cultural collision, seismic instability, severe inequality, schemes and dreams and never enough money. Elaine Wynn, the late hotelier, casino owner, philanthropist, and co-chair of the LACMA board, pledged fifty million dollars. When I interviewed her, in 2020, she conceded that supporting Zumthor was a risk. “He had not done anything monumental,” she said. “Everything he had done was so precious. But each was so authentic. . . . it was theatrical without being false or pretentious.”
Eventually, Wynn’s donation was eclipsed by a hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar gift from the entertainment executive David Geffen, who secured the naming rights to the whole building, which is, officially, the David Geffen Galleries. Wynn, who died last spring and for whom a wing of Zumthor’s aerodynamic structure is named, donated a Francis Bacon triptych depicting Bacon’s friend and fellow-painter Lucian Freud, the only Bacons on display in a public Los Angeles museum. It’s here, with your back to the Bacons, that you can sit on a gracious leather bench and watch the cars rush by on Wilshire, the crowns of the palms just below eye level, from the vertiginous flying-dream vantage of a bird alighting.
The new LACMA is organized by bodies of water—the art of the Pacific, Indian, Mediterranean, and Atlantic regions each occupies a zone. Rather than a catalogue of human achievement, arranged Eurocentrically and hierarchically, the layout suggests affinities, connections, and unexpected cross-pollinations: John Singer Sargent’s “Rose-Marie Ormond Reading in a Cashmere Shawl” and a nineteenth-century European paisley dress alongside a rare Kashmiri map shawl; Greg Noll’s longboard with Issey Miyake’s molded-plastic bustier. When I visited the new building with Govan, he joked that Los Angeles’s encyclopedic museum still had all the hallmarks of its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century counterparts. “Split-Rocker,” a towering animal-head totem by Jeff Koons adorned with thousands of native plants, served as the lion at the gate. Michael Heizer’s sculpture “Levitated Mass,” a three-hundred-and-forty-ton boulder suspended over a concrete slot, was a negative-space version of an obelisk, and Chris Burden’s “Urban Light,” an array of columns made from disused L.A. streetlamps, was the requisite Greco-Roman temple.
Creating a fluid, omnidirectional space was central to what Govan had hoped to achieve. “I wanted everything on one floor,” he said. “No front, no back, up, or down. You have many ways to pass through the building, and so you pick your own. There’s no one way through art history.” Art is hung and displayed all along the building’s perimeter, facing windows open to the cityscape, and in numerous small interior galleries. “It’s like a little European village, just like Peter’s village, with terraces, streets, and plazas,” Govan said. “And you just find what you want.” The guidebook sold in the museum store is called “Wander.” Conversations overheard in the Geffen Galleries mostly revolve around attempts to meet up when one in a party has gone astray. “Where are you?” I heard several people say into their phones, before struggling to describe their location. By the big Egyptian sphynx that is not actually Egyptian, but was commissioned from the contemporary L.A. sculptor Lauren Halsey, close to the Athena. . . . Oh, never mind, I’ll just meet you at the Erewhon. (A micro-Erewhon café has opened on LACMA’s ground level, facing the reinstalled and refurbished Calder.)
The impulse to prioritize individual experience, inviting visitors to get lost the way one might in a garden, makes a powerful argument that is not just about art history but also about Los Angeles as a city of artists in potential. “Half of every perception is what you bring to it,” Govan said. “You have to make space for that. For me, the ideal museum is something that gives you ideas to do something creative. It’s not just about taking in what people have done but about what’s possible.”
The new building, made from old materials using ultra-modern technology, has a quality that makes it singular in Los Angeles. Solid as a rock, it feels as if it’s been here all along, and as if it will be here well past when the rest of the place is gone. It’s easy to envision: Heizer’s boulder and slot, the spontaneously blooming rocker, and a streetlamp or two, a monument to culture in the midst of a future wasteland. ♦