LACMA Opens Peter Zumthor Building With a Curatorial Gamble of Its Own
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has opened its new flagship building, a long-awaited Peter Zumthor design that turns the museum into a moving sequence of light, concrete, and glass. Elevated over Wilshire Boulevard, the structure uses windows, tinted glass, and curtains to pull California daylight into the galleries, creating an interior that changes as visitors move through it.
That architectural fluidity is matched by Michael Govan’s curatorial vision. The museum’s CEO and director has used the new building to rethink how history is presented, mixing contemporary art with classical sculpture and arranging the collection in a loose geography that moves by oceans rather than continents. The effect is deliberately unsettled: a visitor may pass from Jeff Koons’s “Split-Rocker” to Tavares Strachan’s “Fulani (A Map of the Crown),” then encounter the Bateman Mercury, Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucian Freud,” or galleries devoted to “Pan-Asian Buddhist Art,” “Turmoil and Optimism in Latin America,” and “Textile Conversations: African and Black America.”
The opening arrives after months of criticism and second-guessing surrounding Govan’s passion project. Now the public can test the building on its own terms, inside a museum that seems intent on refusing a single historical lane. Instead of a fixed march through time or place, LACMA offers a more porous experience, one in which classical sculpture, modern painting, and contemporary installation continually interrupt one another.
The new building also underscores how much of the museum’s identity now rests on choreography: of sightlines, of materials, and of the relationships between objects that would once have been kept apart. Whether that produces clarity or productive disorientation may be the central question of this opening, and one that will shape how the museum is read for years to come.
