After nearly two decades and a $724 million cost, LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries have opened. Designed by Peter Zumthor, the elevated building replaces much of the old campus, consolidating it into a single continuous gallery level and redefining the museum as one unified spatial structure.
The project removes several earlier structures across the campus footprint to make space for the new building, effectively resetting how the museum is physically and conceptually organized. In their place is a long, elevated concrete form that extends across Wilshire Boulevard, creating a large shaded public ground beneath it and tying the museum more directly to the surrounding city.
Inside, the curatorial logic abandons conventional sequencing. There is no fixed route, no chronological progression, and no clear beginning or end. Works from different cultures and periods are placed in proximity, shifting the experience toward open-ended association rather than guided narrative.
The collection is instead loosely structured around oceanic frameworks, Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Mediterranean, treating these as zones of exchange and circulation rather than fixed geographic containers. This produces unexpected adjacency, but also raises questions about whether difference is clarified or softened in the process.
The building itself has quickly become polarizing. Supporters emphasize its spatial openness, diffuse natural light, and the way it activates previously unused urban space below. It effectively extends the museum into public circulation, turning the site into something closer to a civic platform than a sealed cultural object.
Critics, including in early reviews from major outlets such as The Art Newspaper and The New York Times, point to a more conflicted reality. Navigation can feel disorienting, with a lack of clear orientation points or hierarchy. Some describe the galleries as visually striking but uneven in density, with moments that feel expansive to the point of emptiness. Others question the environmental cost of such a large concrete and steel structure, especially given the demolition of much of the earlier campus.
Much of this transformation reflects the long-term vision of director Michael Govan, under whose leadership LACMA has steadily moved toward a less linear, more experiential model of display. The museum is framed less as a chronological archive and more as a field of encounters, where meaning emerges through proximity rather than sequence.
The opening week reinforced that ambition. A high-profile gala brought together figures from across the art and cultural world, including George Lucas, Ed Ruscha, and Jeff Koons, signaling the institution’s continued alignment with both contemporary art discourse and broader cultural visibility. Performances and installations during the launch period further activated the space, emphasizing multiplicity over a single interpretive frame.
The David Geffen Galleries replace narrative certainty with spatial and conceptual openness, where orientation is partial and meaning is constantly negotiated, shaped by what the visitor chooses to connect, ignore, or question.
