While driving back from a visit to the David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), digesting my experience of the new brutalist monument to the city designed by Peter Zumthor, I drove under a freeway overpass and was struck by its inset lights and lengthy curvature. Raised over the street, the expansive arc of concrete was uncannily mimicked by Zumthor’s LACMA design. Touted as “a vision of what a global art museum might be in today’s world,”¹ the new building—two decades in the making and costing three-quarters of a billion dollars—feels most legible as a sculptural representation of transportation infrastructure, an ode to the nineteenth-century invention of modern reinforced concrete and its impact on the landscape of a multicultural city like Los Angeles. Occupying the east side of the museum campus, the seamless one-story concrete building hovers some 30 feet overhead and curves across Wilshire Boulevard, its floor-to-ceiling windows offering views of some of the artworks from the street. Since the building plans were approved in 2019, the building has been polarizing, with some criticizing the aesthetics and others questioning how best to approach the redesign of the premier encyclopedic collection on the West Coast.²

It’s been clear in reviewing others’ reactions to the building plans that the debate hinges on the tensions between historical relevance and cultural innovation. If we view the role of museums as cultural arbiters and sites of cultural stewardship, the David Geffen Galleries are an example of how the unifying theme of architecture can create a link between the city and the museum collection as a catchall symbolizing the unification of the city’s own diversity. The question becomes how successful this is. One key argument against the new buildings has been a practical critique of its craftsmanship and its ability to securely maintain its collections.³ Ultimately, the conversation debates the theoretical and the practical.

Some feel, romantically, that the David Geffen Galleries idealize, uplift, and glamorize the aesthetics of an otherwise ubiquitous and unsexy commuter passageway, recontextualizing it as a monumental, culturally significant symbol of the L.A. landscape. Others, more cynically, emphasize how this vision of the city comes from a non-local perspective; one could argue that the Swiss-born architect situates a cliché symbol of the city as the new locus of Miracle Mile, effectively erasing the legacy of the original Mid-Century Modern buildings designed by William Pereira, which had defined the Wilshire Boulevard landscape for decades.

There are redeeming moments across the finished campus that connect the new galleries to the original Pereira buildings: the return of Tony Smith’s Smoke (1967) and Alexander Calder’s original commission Three Quintains (Hello Girls) (1964), though these objects might be the only familiar friends in an otherwise completely upended museum campus. Gone is the regionalism of the mid-century modernism that Pereira cultivated throughout the city. For critics of Los Angeles claiming the city has “no history,” unfortunately, the David Geffen Galleries miss an opportunity to connect to the history and legacy of architecture in the city, choosing instead to cater to a mindset that favors novelty over historical preservation, furthering a message that Los Angeles is a city unmoored from its own past. This all before even entering the building.

Once inside, the building’s design continues to conjure a strong sense of transience in the way visitors move through it. Circumnavigating the flattened and sprawling maze of near-identical concrete rooms and exterior corridors, I found myself disoriented. As I weaved through the galleries, I overheard several visitors asking gallery attendants which way the exit was. The flattening of the galleries resonates on a conceptual level; all the work appears on a single level, a conscious decision that resists nineteenth-century museology in its refusal to adhere to traditional art historical hierarchies defined by culture, region, and linearity. However, the results are a labyrinthine open concept plan that is more experimental in its statement than it is practical in its actuality. A wall text explains that the museum is “designed to encourage wandering,” suggesting that the museum-going audience could and should be their own authority over their viewing experience. While this mission is conceptually interesting, the effect is a cavernous, light-shifting tangle of galleries that are uneven in their scope and minimally narrativized, inviting the question of what a “global” audience prefers: subjective experience or objective authority.

Similarly, the building attempts a conceptual approach to lighting that at times is more compelling in theory than in practice. The museum wanted “light and shadow to work in dialogue,”⁴ and the building features floor-to-ceiling glass windows shrouded by Reiko Sudō-designed sputter-plated chrome curtains that filter light through various times of day, season, and weather.⁵ The shifting nature of the outside light poetically proposes daylight as another key characteristic of the building (and the city itself). But in reality, the lack of controlled lighting results in shadowy contrast, distracting glare, and a sense of theatricality that in many cases overpowers the art. I walked through a corridor of Thomas Joshua Cooper’s Atlantic Basin photographs (1987–2010) to see them eclipsed by the sun’s reflection that cast a glare off of the glazed frames, obscuring the images. An entire wall text is dedicated to promoting the building’s thesis on light in a gallery that claims to have works on view that respond to and reflect the light. Unfortunately, one must be there at the right time of day to see this claim come to fruition.

After my two visits to the new galleries, I was left with a yearning for the old Pereira buildings and their mid-century modern design that carried a nostalgia of an older Los Angeles unburdened by globalization. The LACMA campus itself is a Frankenstein of different architectural styles, which was arguably more interesting when the old buildings still existed, almost like an architectural history of the city itself. Now with the sleek, sculptural concrete Geffen building, the new LACMA proposes an aesthetic that appeals to a newer, more homogenizing global perspective that argues for new paradigms for art viewing. However, these paradigms seem to value aesthetics over substance and practicality.

      Olivia Gauthier

Inaugural presentation in the David Geffen Galleries (installation view) (2026). © Museum Associates/LACMA. Photo: Kristina Simonsen.

Inaugural presentation in the David Geffen Galleries (installation view) (2026). © Museum Associates/LACMA. Photo: Kristina Simonsen.