David Geffen Galleries at LACMA Opens With a Clear Strength — and a Blind Spot
Peter Zumthor’s long-awaited $724 million building for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has finally entered public view, and it immediately clarifies what kind of museum architecture he has made for Los Angeles. The Swiss architect’s David Geffen Galleries is a sweeping concrete-and-glass structure that feels most convincing when it is doing something museums often struggle to do well: giving antiquities, sculpture, textiles, and decorative objects a physical charge that matches their material presence.
The building sits on seven legs, or “pavilions,” and keeps the campus visible from within and without. Visitors can look across the site toward Chris Burden’s Urban Light and Henri Matisse’s La Gerbe, while the new structure itself will eventually house restaurants, a shop, a bar, and an education center. That openness to the campus matters in Los Angeles, a city whose cultural geography is famously dispersed rather than centered.
Michael Govan, who has led LACMA since 2006, has long described the museum less as a single encyclopedic institution than as a set of collections with gaps as well as strengths. The new galleries reflect that thinking. Their displays move loosely through a “four oceans” rubric, bringing together Spanish religious painting, Arts and Crafts holdings, Persian antiquities, and other holdings in ways that favor association over rigid chronology.
The architecture is at its best with objects that reward close looking. Liz Glynn’s The Futility of Conquest, a torso-less, six-legged, three-haunched creature from 2023, lands with particular force in the north elevators. So does Manjunath Kamath’s Vikatonarva, a 2024 terracotta figure crowned by branches sprouting miniature heads. A Colima earthenware dog, more than 2,200 years old, and Lauren Halsey’s neo-Egyptian sphinx also benefit from the building’s emphasis on mass, texture, and silhouette.
The same qualities can be less forgiving to oil painting, especially works with delicate imagery. Thick interior walls and a strong material palette seem to favor sturdy forms, while the galleries’ relative spareness sometimes leaves viewers wanting more historical and biographical context. That tension is central to the building’s identity: it is a museum designed to make matter feel alive, even when the interpretive frame remains deliberately light.
