“A great place for a walk-and-talk with your ex”: Angelenos weigh in on the new LACMA

I’m happy to share the news that the Graham Foundation’s 2026 Grants to Individuals program, announced yesterday, includes an award supporting Punch List. Stay tuned for details about the editorial initiatives that this funding will make possible. Sincere thanks to Sarah Herda and James Pike of the Graham for the vote of confidence—and congrats to the other grantees!

You can match the Graham Foundation’s support by becoming a paid Punch List subscriber here.

And now on to this week’s dispatch, a report from Los Angeles:

We had a packed house Sunday afternoon for “A LACMA Therapy Session,” the debut event in our new Punch List live series. (Stay tuned for news of future programs; if you want to collaborate on one, please be in touch.) Organized jointly with L.A. Material and New York Review of Architecture and held at the Barnsdall Gallery Theater, next to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House, it was framed as a chance for the people of Los Angeles to process their complicated feelings about the museum’s new David Geffen Galleries.

And process they did. Partway through the program I shared a phone number for audience members to send their thoughts about the building via text. After a terrific panel moderated by Antonia Cereijido of L.A. Material and featuring Samuel Medina, Frederick Fisher, Carolina A. Miranda, and Jimenez Lai, I closed the proceedings by sharing some of those responses.

But I couldn’t possibly get to all of them, and I include some highlights here. Interspersed throughout are some of the photographs that we commissioned for the event from the Los Angeles artist Janna Ireland, who joined me onstage during the Sunday event to talk about her response to the Zumthor building and her broader approach to architectural photography. I’m thrilled that Punch List includes exclusive new photographs two weeks in a row, following the images of the Obama Presidential Center, by Nathan Kirkman, that we featured last Friday.

Okay, on to the LACMA vox populi:

• The new LACMA is on my Top Ten list of “favorite mausolea.”

• This was the first building that made me question my aesthetic commitment to Brutalism. For a new building to have rust and stains before it even opens is atrocious—even where, in other contexts, the rust and stains of an old building would age it beautifully.

• I love how it creates much more of a campus feel with LACMA, the Tar Pits, Academy Museum, even the red-headed step-museum Petersen. I hate how it turns its back on the city itself.

• A great place for a walk-and-talk with your ex. An okay place to look at art.

• I hate the curtains. Why didn’t they use solar blinds that disappear?

• Important contribution to Los Angeles. Pros outweigh cons.

• I do love the stained concrete in gallery spaces. The blue is beautiful.

• Quite the sublime experience underneath the raised gallery. Something Piranesian about the amorphous concrete expanse below.

• The bathrooms had better light fixtures than the galleries!

• I sadly liked it better before I found out about the clerestories that were value-engineered away. It’s hard to let go of what could have been.

• In defense of LACMA’s non-linear curation: It did feel like a positive reflection of L.A. Artifacts from all over the world, assembled and clustered.

• I am excited to be wearing an oversized mirrored disco ball version of this building in the LACMA Art Parade [on June 20]. The idea is pretty simple: it’s a monumental mirror that reflects the many different ways people feel about Los Angeles, and an object onto which we can project our visions for the future of our city. [Ed: More amazing details from IG: “The Geffen Galleries Disco Ball is an oversized model of the Peter Zumthor-designed building covered in mirrors— designed to get the party started! . . . Marchers will be handing out laser pointers or pocket mirrors to activate the Disco Ball!”]

• I love the feeling of being in the building. Don’t love the lack of wall text. Felt like the building was leaving me to make my own connections and conclusions, rather than helping connect things for me.

• A Swiss architect’s idea of L.A.

• They tried to place the works like Carlo Scarpa, forcing you to walk around the display, but it is not done as well as Castelvecchio or other Scarpa museums.

• Residential feeling: large dining table, giving the mass public the feeling of going to a house party at a modernist mansion in the hills.

• The horizontal feels like L.A.—beach, mountains, sprawl.

• I love the sense of disorientation the building generates. The curation of pieces not by era or artist but by “theme” feels very modern, very Amazon Prime: “If you like this ancient Egyptian sarcophagus, you may also like this modern piece by a South L.A. artist inspired by the Sphinx.”

• After the environmental criticism received by EOM's (W)rapper, I think Zumthor’s abundant use of concrete is a brave and arrogant defiance. It’s interesting to see an architect design their only building in the U.S. as an immortal memorial to L.A.’s urban culture at such a miserable sociopolitical moment.

• When will L.A. see itself as a city that does not need to invite carpetbaggers from New York or Europe to run our museums and destroy our architectural history? When will L.A. architects not named Gehry be hired to build our cultural institutions? As with Trump’s arch, the people have no input but have to pay the bill. The lack of onsite storage, office space, conservation lab, etc., means the taxpayers will be picking up the tab into the future. This works as sculpture but fails as an art institution.

• I’ve never felt so thoroughly inside and outside of a building at the same time. It is very unpretentiously self-referential, which feels exquisitely L.A.

• The museum was made for short-attention-span Instagram. I want a basement with all the other art we’re missing. And text. And MORE BENCHES!!!!

• The sectional relationship is still the strongest-hitting part. The relationship to the ground is awesome. I do wish there was more landscape and other elements that bled into the hardscape, but valuing the ground floor of the city and providing an opportunity to look down on it is more important than another gallery space.

• Brilliant public building and urban icon for L.A. Flawed, bold, and challenging museum that may evolve and be understood over time.

• A win for the profession. The building makes architecture truly palpable to the public and its controversy allows us to see, feel, and discuss the power of the built environment in such a fun way. Makes me feel so excited to be an architect again.

• I’m reminded of initial public outrage over the de Young. Herzog & de Meuron similarly reflected in frustration: “This is the cheapest building we’ve ever done.” And now it soars in public opinion, especially the lookout tower.

• As a museum, the architecture forces curators to work muscles that have atrophied from the relative ease of working within the white cube. Without the decontextualizing canvas of “neutrality,” curators will be encouraged to think about new ways of making connections: across cultures, against the environment, throughout history. We should all welcome the confrontation of a new challenge.

• I find it uncanny as a building. For such a slug of a building, when inside, it dematerializes with the perimeter glass. Vitrines and cubes.

• The new LACMA’s unconventional spaces and “wander-intensive” experience should prove to be an exciting challenge for curators. I also hope LACMA has big plans for its exterior spaces to become a frequent area for public events and art of all kinds. Otherwise it will be yet another empty, forbidding, liminal space, and a missed opportunity for the city and its people.

• Has everyone forgotten how art was displayed prior to the 20th century? The “dim” and colorful interior spaces are a wonderful harkening to the classic salons and great estates that so much of the collection was designed to be seen in.

• If you ask the public what they want, you get the Museum of Ice Cream, or President Trump. The fantastic results speak to this process working.

• During the first week of previews I took a very handsome man on a date to the building. I thought it would charm him. He dumped me the following day.

And finally (photograph not by Janna Ireland):

News & Notes

“Remember, I lived in bohemia in L.A. It’s a tolerant place. They know about human failings.” David Hockney RIP.

Antoni Gaudí died 100 years ago this week, after being hit by a tram on a Barcelona street. I wrote about his quixotic efforts to finish the Sagradia Familia for the latest National Geographic.

The World Cup, hosted jointly by Mexico, Canada, and the U.S., kicked off yesterday; the U.S. has its first match today, against Paraguay, at “Los Angeles Stadium” (née Sofi). L.A. Material has an item on the “tiny diaspora” of Paraguayans in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, here is Archinect’s World Cup stadium guide.

The AIA Twenty-Five Year Award, a.k.a. the only architecture honor that matters, is back!

I’m headed to Morocco, Spain, and Portugal for a couple of weeks. I’d be grateful for your architecture and food recs: [email protected].

See you next week!

Punch List is published weekly. Subscribe free here, or sign up for a paid subscription, with bonus material, here.

Email: [email protected]