A Stunning New LACMA Descends Upon a City in Crisis

It is for this Los Angeles that the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor has designed a building that is both futuristic and primordial. A great gray swish spanning Wilshire Boulevard, the new LACMA opened to the public in May. It calls to mind a spaceship loaded with several thousand artifacts representative of life on Earth, ready to leave this torn-up planet for a new frontier. It’s a winning building, ambitious, frank, and generous, with soulful poured-in-place raw-concrete walls, and acres of natural light illuminating the art, often without the intervention of vitrines or heavy-handed wall texts. There is ample space for contemplation and surprise.

Zumthor, who is eighty-three and lives in a remote Alpine village, was an esoteric—and controversial—choice of architect for a large-scale public project. (I wrote about Zumthor, and the debate surrounding the building, in 2020.) His work is highly personal and idiosyncratic, and includes a thermal spa, a field chapel dedicated to a Swiss mystic, and a monument to suspected witches burned at the stake in seventeenth-century Norway. He designs from the inside out. “It starts with the intention to create emotional space,” he has said. “I don’t set out to do a beautiful object that you look at from the outside. . . . I’m looking for architecture space, and architecture space, as we know, is a void. . . . I want to design something that doesn’t exist.”

The need to redevelop the LACMA campus was undisputed: even one of the project’s architects endorsed the idea of demolition, not long after construction was complete. In 2001, an international competition was held, resulting in a Rem Koolhaas design; by 2003, the plan, which failed to attract meaningful support from donors, had been abandoned. Then, in 2006, Michael Govan was hired as director and chief executive officer of LACMA. This time, there would be no competition or public process. Govan hand-selected Zumthor, and then set about persuading the county, which dedicated a hundred and twenty-five million dollars in taxpayer money, and the donor class, which provided the rest, to trust his pick.

Zumthor had never worked in the United States. At LACMA, he was tasked with making a public building in an American megacity, a place of thrilling cultural collision, seismic instability, severe inequality, schemes and dreams and never enough money. Elaine Wynn, the late hotelier, casino owner, philanthropist, and co-chair of the LACMA board, pledged fifty million dollars. When I interviewed her, in 2020, she conceded that supporting Zumthor was a risk. “He had not done anything monumental,” she said. “Everything he had done was so precious. But each was so authentic. . . . it was theatrical without being false or pretentious.”

Eventually, Wynn’s donation was eclipsed by a hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar gift from the entertainment executive David Geffen, who secured the naming rights to the whole building, which is, officially, the David Geffen Galleries. Wynn, who died last spring and for whom a wing of Zumthor’s aerodynamic structure is named, donated a Francis Bacon triptych depicting Bacon’s friend and fellow-painter Lucian Freud, the only Bacons on display in a public Los Angeles museum. It’s here, with your back to the Bacons, that you can sit on a gracious leather bench and watch the cars rush by on Wilshire, the crowns of the palms just below eye level, from the vertiginous flying-dream vantage of a bird alighting.