Peter Zumthor's LACMA David Geffen Galleries Open, Challenging Museum Hierarchies

After more than two decades of planning, fundraising, and fierce civic debate, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has officially opened the doors to its David Geffen Galleries. The $724 million expansion, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, represents one of the most ambitious and polarizing cultural projects in recent American history. Opening to the public in the spring of 2026, the structure replaces four aging buildings on the museum's East Campus with a single, sweeping monolithic form. But beyond its striking silhouette, the building represents a radical philosophical gamble by LACMA Director Michael Govan. It is an attempt to fundamentally rewrite the spatial rules of the encyclopedic art museum, discarding centuries of institutional tradition in favor of a completely new way for the public to encounter human creativity.[2][5]

The physical presence of the David Geffen Galleries is impossible to ignore. Rather than a traditional multi-story edifice anchored to the ground, Zumthor's design lifts the entire exhibition floor nearly 30 feet into the air. The sinuous, sand-colored concrete and glass structure stretches across the museum's campus and physically bridges Wilshire Boulevard, one of the city's busiest arterial roads. This elevated "pancake" rests on seven massive, irregularly spaced concrete pavilions at ground level. These foundational blocks do not hold art; instead, they house the museum's functional organs—the auditorium, educational centers, restaurants, bookstores, and elevators. By pushing the infrastructure to the ground floor, the architects freed the elevated level to serve as an uninterrupted, continuous plane dedicated entirely to the display of the permanent collection.[3][5]

The decision to elevate the galleries was driven by a specific curatorial mandate: the desire to create a "non-hierarchical" museum. For centuries, encyclopedic museums have relied on multi-story layouts that inherently impose a value system on the art they display. Grand staircases often lead to European masterworks on the upper floors, while indigenous, ancient, or non-Western artifacts are frequently relegated to basements or peripheral wings. Govan and Zumthor sought to dismantle this built-in Western pecking order. By mandating that the entire 150,000-object permanent collection be displayed on a single, continuous level, the architecture forces all cultures, eras, and mediums onto an equal democratic plane. There is no "important art upstairs," because there is no upstairs.[4][6][7]

Executing this single-level vision required abandoning the traditional chronological and geographical wings that define institutions like the Louvre or the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Inside the David Geffen Galleries, visitors will not find a "19th-Century French Painting" wing followed neatly by a "20th-Century Modernism" wing. Instead, the layout is intentionally unpredictable and meandering, designed to avoid linear histories or prescribed paths. Govan explicitly instructed Zumthor that he did not want "anyone in the front." The architecture encourages visitors to wander, allowing them to draw their own connections between disparate cultures and time periods rather than following a rigid, curator-dictated timeline.[1][4]

This philosophical shift is immediately apparent in the building's inaugural installation. Rather than organizing the art by nation-states or centuries, the curators have used the world's major bodies of water—the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans, and the Mediterranean Sea—as thematic frameworks. This approach highlights the historical trade routes, migrations, and cultural exchanges that have shaped human history, creating surprising juxtapositions. A single gallery might place a Qing Dynasty court robe in dialogue with a contemporary sculpture, emphasizing global interconnectedness over isolated regional development. The architecture's fluid, open-plan perimeter supports this cross-pollination, allowing sightlines to stretch across different curatorial zones.[3][8]

The gallery level itself is a complex spatial puzzle. Within the sweeping exterior envelope, Zumthor has arranged 26 distinct inner galleries. These enclosed spaces range dramatically in size, from intimate 15-square-meter rooms designed for light-sensitive textiles to expansive 300-square-meter halls capable of holding monumental sculptures. The spaces between these enclosed galleries form a wide, meandering perimeter promenade wrapped entirely in floor-to-ceiling glass. This layout allows visitors to constantly step out of the dense, focused art environments and into the light-filled corridors, reorienting themselves against the sweeping panoramic views of the Los Angeles skyline and the adjacent La Brea Tar Pits.[2][3]

Light plays a central, defining role in the Zumthor experience, challenging another entrenched museum convention. Most modern museums rely heavily on artificially lit, climate-controlled "black boxes" to protect artworks and control the viewing environment. Zumthor, renowned for his atmospheric and sensory-driven designs like the Therme Vals in Switzerland, insisted on bathing the perimeter spaces in natural California sunlight. To protect the collection, the massive glass walls are heavily UV-treated, and custom-designed metallic gauze curtains of varying densities can be deployed to modulate the glare. Inside the enclosed galleries, narrow clerestory windows and custom wall brackets cast a soft, even glow, fighting the fatigue that often accompanies hours spent in artificial lighting.[3][5]

The material palette of the David Geffen Galleries is uncompromisingly raw and tactile, a stark departure from the pristine white drywall typical of contemporary art spaces. The exterior and interior walls are constructed from poured-in-place concrete, left unadorned to reveal the marks of its making. The floors are a dark concrete terrazzo embedded with tiny white shells, a subtle nod to the fact that the Los Angeles basin was once a prehistoric seabed. To soften the brutalist aesthetic inside the galleries, the concrete walls are coated in a specialized silicon-based paint in deep tones of indigo, dark red, and black, providing a rich, textured backdrop for the artwork.[3][4]

Achieving this uncompromising vision came at a steep cost, both financially and spatially, fueling a decade of intense controversy. To make way for the new structure, LACMA demolished three original 1965 pavilions designed by William Pereira, as well as a 1986 addition by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates. Preservationists mourned the loss of the historic campus, but the sharpest criticism centered on the new building's size. The David Geffen Galleries offer roughly 110,000 square feet of gallery space—a significant reduction from the square footage of the buildings it replaced. Critics have argued that spending over $700 million to shrink the region's only encyclopedic museum is a dereliction of civic duty.[4][5][7]

The construction process itself was fraught with delays and budget escalations. Building a massive, heavy concrete structure in an active earthquake zone is inherently complex; building it next to the bubbling asphalt of the La Brea Tar Pits proved monumental. During excavation, crews unearthed significant Ice Age fossils, including thirteen saber-tooth tiger skulls, which required careful paleontological extraction and halted progress. As the budget swelled toward $835 million by some estimates, Zumthor's original concept—which envisioned a dark, tar-colored building dubbed the "Black Flower"—was repeatedly value-engineered. The footprint shrank, and the color shifted from black to tan before settling on the raw gray concrete seen today.[4][7]

The architectural reception has been fiercely polarized. Detractors have likened the sprawling, elevated concrete mass to a freeway overpass or an "amoebic pancake," arguing that the stark interior walls are hostile to the delicate act of hanging paintings. Some prominent donors even publicly broke with the museum over the non-linear curatorial strategy. Yet, defenders of the project argue that these critiques miss the fundamental point. The downstream challenges—the reduced square footage, the complex wayfinding, the raw materials—are not bugs in the execution, but the inevitable costs of committing to the single-level, non-hierarchical concept. To have a truly democratic, one-story encyclopedic museum, the building had to sprawl, and compromises had to be made.[4][6][7]

Ultimately, the David Geffen Galleries represent a bold, high-stakes experiment in cultural infrastructure. By refusing to default to the standard multi-story, chronological template, LACMA has forced a global conversation about how institutions frame human history. Whether visitors find the meandering, sun-drenched concrete spaces liberating or disorienting, the building succeeds in its primary goal: it offers an experience that cannot be found in London, Paris, or New York. It is a museum inextricably tied to the horizontality, light, and ambition of Los Angeles, challenging the rest of the world to rethink what a 21st-century institution can be.[1][3][8]