Review: Peter Zumthor’s controversial LACMA wing is flawed and thrilling

I’ve been writing about Peter Zumthor’s design for a new wing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for more than 15 years, or well over half my career as an architecture critic. (You could say it’s my white whale, or maybe my béton-brut albatross.) Earlier this month I finally got a chance to see the finished product, thanks to a tour from Michael Govan, LACMA’s director since 2006.

I was already planning to introduce Punch List, a weekly newsletter and website for architecture news and criticism, this summer. Getting an advance look at the Zumthor building was just the push I needed to launch the project. (Empty of art, the LACMA wing will open to the public and press for an unusual three-day preview beginning June 26, with a full debut planned in April of next year.) The post you’re reading, in other words, is two weeks and a decade and a half in the making.

The short version of my reaction to the new LACMA is that it’s bold and compromised in nearly equal measure: a sort of hamstrung Gesamtkunstwerk. It aspires to be a transporting, soup-to-nuts Zumthor ocean liner, with every detail designed by a single hand, but keeps springing leaks. At the same time, my sense is that Angelenos, thanks in large part to the design’s curious and openhearted attitude toward the city around it, will quickly embrace the new wing. 

Before we take a look inside the building—known officially as the David Geffen Galleries, for its lead donor—a bit of backstory is probably in order. Okay, a lot of backstory.

Since the Getty Center by Richard Meier and Partners was completed on a Brentwood hilltop overlooking the 405 Freeway, in 1997, no architectural project in Los Angeles has generated more angst, anticipation, or debate than Zumthor’s LACMA design. Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003) and the Broad Museum by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (2015), neighbors on Grand Avenue downtown, were lightning rods in their own ways, but the reaction they generated looks tame compared to the often bilious response Govan’s gambit has prompted from critics, local architects, and the broader public.

The main complaints are these: the 82-year-old Zumthor, having never worked in the U.S. or at anything like this scale, is the wrong architect for the job; Govan handpicked him in secret; and the design they’ve produced together threatens to turn LACMA, the region’s only encyclopedic museum, into a shrunken, less serious, and more debt-laden version of itself.

The Geffen Galleries, which will cost a reported $835 million all-in, with $125 million coming from Los Angeles County, are made of poured-in-place concrete, with details largely in bronze. Zumthor calls the building a “concrete sculpture.” It consists of a single, massive gallery level lifted thirty feet in the air atop seven stout legs that hold, among other spaces, a shop, restaurant, and auditorium. (Two wide cantilevered stairs extend from the exterior of the building.) It replaces the original ensemble of LACMA galleries, which were designed by William Pereira in the lightly ornamented New Formalist style and opened, set back from the street behind a sequence of reflecting pools, in 1965.

The curvilinear wing, 900 feet long, spans Wilshire Boulevard, with one of its legs touching down on the southern side of the street, filling what used to be a surface parking lot. It joins a dense collection of cultural institutions and newish architecture. Immediately to the west are a pair of LACMA buildings by Renzo Piano Building Workshop: the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM for short, from 2008) and the Resnick Pavilion (2010). Other neighbors include a third Piano design, a spherical extension of the old May Company store for the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (2021); the La Brea Tar Pits (part of a complex overseen by the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History and now being remade by the New York firm Weiss/Manfredi); and KPF’s Petersen Automotive Museum (2015), a blood-red, sixteen-car-pileup of a building. A subway station on the Metro D Line is scheduled to open on the block by the end of 2025.

Over the years I’ve made two trips to Zumthor’s studio in the Swiss village of Haldenstein and to see his European art museums and other work by his firm, Atelier Peter Zumthor. (One was during my tenure as Los Angeles Times architecture critic, the other for the New York Times.) On the second visit, in 2023, construction back in L.A. was well underway. Zumthor was anxious about how things were going. At least one big concrete pour had already gone awry. Budget pressures showed no signs of easing. He seemed to be using our conversation to prepare the museum-going public, as I wrote, “for a straightforward, even austere final product.”

“I had, if I can say so, a beautiful idea at the beginning,” he told me, referring to the jet-black inkblot of a building he first envisioned, seemingly inspired variously by the collages of Jean Arp, the architecture of Oscar Niemeyer, Le Corbusier, and Lina Bo Bardi, and the tar pits next door. Govan and Zumthor were united in the mildly quixotic idea that the permanent-exhibition galleries, with the goal of breaking down the hierarchies of the traditional encyclopedic museum, and to reflect the basic horizontality of Los Angeles, should be contained on one level. (The decision to then lift that one level into the air and drag it across Wilshire made the notion fully quixotic.) Over time, the color of the new wing evolved from black to tan and finally unpainted concrete. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill came on board as collaborating architect. The building grew smaller and simpler.

When I asked Zumthor which of his trademark details might survive the budget squeeze—he is known, for example, for carefully chosen hardware, with a particular attention to the shape and weight of door handles and handrails, the places where visitors first touch his buildings—he looked at me matter-of-factly.

“There are no Zumthor details anymore,” he said.

This was partly hyperbolic, of course. I recognized his self-pitying tone as one certain architects turn to when they feel their talents are being undervalued by clients, critics, or both. (Frank Gehry has often used it in conversations with me over the years.) Still, the comment made me even more curious to see the final product at LACMA—to see for myself what, precisely, had become of Zumthor’s “beautiful idea.”

Late on a recent weekday afternoon, after the work crews adding final touches to the building had gone home, I met Govan and an aide in front of “Urban Light,” the wildly popular installation of pewter-gray lampposts that artist Chris Burden added to the LACMA campus in 2008. After Govan pulled back a massive white construction fence, we walked toward the Geffen Galleries, which loom over a new plaza featuring an artwork, etched into the concrete, by Mariana Castillo Deball.

As I crossed the plaza and looked up at the underside of the building, near its northern end, I had a clear view of one of the places where value-engineering has taken a toll. Instead of following the sweeping arc of the building’s roofline, as early versions of the design called for, the windows and the concrete slab supporting them are squared off in several spots, presumably to avoid the cost or complexity of producing so much curved glass. The references to the biomorphic forms of Arp and Niemeyer are still there, but along the bottom lip of the building they look like they’ve been rendered in Minecraft.

When we stepped inside and entered the gallery level, what struck me first was the absolute quiet of the massive space. Next came the remarkable sensation that Zumthor has succeeded in producing an all-encompassing architecture, a concrete cocoon that shuts out the chaos of the surrounding city even as it offers shifting views of—depending on your location inside the building—the Hollywood Hills, the downtown skyline, the bubbling tar pits, and traffic in both directions on Wilshire. The concrete is treated differently on each plane: the floor is dark gray and flecked with tiny shells; the walls are intentionally raw and unadorned; and the ceiling is a thick slab, also uncolored, with cylindrical cutouts for recessed air ducts and lighting. (There are also cylindrical and angular black pendant lights.) Along the edges, floor-to-ceiling glass is framed by bronze mullions.

Then, slowly, reality began to intrude. I noticed uneven execution in nearly every direction. The floor is veined with spidery cracks. The walls are discolored by huge water stains and other flaws. To be fair, I was seeing a building that wasn’t quite ready for its closeup, with the floors yet to be cleaned or the curtains added to the windows. Still, it’s fair to say that Zumthor’s design promised a level of precision and rigor that the finished product fails in a number of ways to reach. 

Filling the new wing are 26 standalone core galleries, also in concrete, in a range of sizes. Each one has a simple, squared-off entry and a straightforward interior, with no baseboards or moldings. (The inside walls of the galleries, when I visited, had yet to be tinted with what the L.A. Times has said will be “a bespoke color palette featuring all-natural architectural pigments.”) These rooms were originally supposed to bring in natural light from above, borrowing a strategy Zumthor used to great effect at his Kolumba Museum (2007) in Cologne. As the L.A. design was streamlined, the galleries were made virtually windowless, except for a narrow clerestory gap in some of them. 

(An example of what might have been is available just a few miles east, in downtown L.A., where Rafael Moneo’s 2002 Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels—another controversial, high-profile, all-concrete behemoth designed by a European Pritzker Prize laureate working in Southern California for the first time—features tall, narrow chapels top-lit by hidden windows.)

At LACMA, the relationship between the fluidity of the space outside the core galleries and the fixity of the galleries themselves—between freedom of movement and a contained, even prescribed path—is more than anything what characterizes the architecture of the new building. “Each gallery is like a house that you can visit,” Zumthor says in an interview for Julian Rose’s book “Building Culture,” published last year. “It has only one entrance, and it is important that you go in and out by the same opening, because this means that a complete, concentrated experience is possible.”

Not every museum architect subscribes to this point of view. In the same book, Kulapat Yantrasast, whose firm WHY Architecture designed the new Michael R. Rockefeller Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, tells Rose, “If you want to get air moving through a room, you have to open two windows: one for it to enter and one for it to exit, right? People are similar; they want to have a clear exit strategy. If a space looks like a dead end, they don’t want to go in.”

Many of the most recognizable objects in the museum’s collection will be displayed in the core galleries. Artwork will also line the exterior walls of these rooms and fill bespoke cases designed by Zumthor’s office. On balance, visitors to the new LACMA are likely to encounter significantly more art outside the standalone galleries than inside them.

The question of how to characterize the space between the galleries and the perimeter of the building—whether to think of it simply as circulation space, as exhibition space, or as something in between—has been at the heart of debates over the design. Even if you count these interstitial areas as display space (which LACMA does), the total square footage for showing art is still less in the new wing (110,000) than in the Pereira buildings (120,000).

For Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight (my former colleague) and other writers who have railed against the project, this is the Zumthor design’s fundamental flaw. Knight won a Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2020 for a series of essays questioning its logic. As he wrote then, “LACMA has become the Incredible Shrinking Museum. I couldn’t name another art museum anywhere that has ever raised hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on reducing its collection space.” LACMA has countered that this arithmetic ignores the two Piano buildings that it added between 2008 and 2010, which together contain 100,000 square feet of exhibition space. “We built the addition[s] first, so we could operate the museum while we tore down” the Pereira campus, Govan told me in 2023.

This isn’t the wrong argument to be having about the Geffen Galleries, necessarily. But I feel strongly that it shouldn’t be the only one. The more important question is the quality of the exhibition space, and more to the point the conditions for viewing and understanding art that it enables. Not once in more than two decades as an architecture critic have I left a museum wishing it had been bigger. (Only better.) And, in some respects, strategic downsizing makes sense: a state-of-the-art 300-seat theater is a better fit for LACMA than the aging and cavernous one, twice as big and rarely filled, that was part of the Pereira campus.

In planning the two Piano buildings, in the decade before Govan arrived, LACMA prioritized the amount of space over the experience of that space; the result is a stacked sequence of large but dreary galleries, among the least satisfying of the Italian architect’s career. The Zumthor wing makes a different kind of wager.

A fuller assessment will be possible, of course, after the art is installed. For now, with the building complete, it’s possible to make a few overarching observations directly:

Zumthor is right about the cumulative effects of downsizing and value engineering. The quality of the concrete construction, on a scale from Ando to Caltrans, is often closer to public-works level. The building can’t hold a candle to Kolumba or Kunsthaus Bregenz, the architect’s most impressive museum buildings in Europe.

Still, the new wing is unquestionably an improvement over the Pereira galleries it replaces. It is better as architecture, and it promises to offer better conditions for looking at works of art. (It’s also worth pointing out that of all the recent architectural additions to the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax, which include the three Piano projects and the Petersen, the Zumthor is far and away the most compelling.) And might I remind everybody just how unloved the original Pereira campus was for most of its life, and how deeply misplaced the nostalgia for it seems now? When David Gebhard and Robert Winter first published their invaluable “Architecture in Southern California” guidebook, in 1965, the museum was brand new; the authors made a point of leaving it out entirely because they didn’t take it seriously as architecture. LACMA’s chief curator in those days, Jim Elliott, called it “the first tract house museum.”

It works better urbanistically than I’d anticipated. I thought the decision to extend the museum south across Wilshire was a mistake, and said so in the L.A. Times. I was wrong. Walking beneath the Geffen Galleries where the building spans the boulevard will surely remind some people of a freeway overpass (or, to borrow a Justin Davidson reference I’m envious of, one of those Italian Autogrills spanning the autostrada); the underside isn’t lifted quite high enough to kill off those comparisons altogether. But the experience of the city made possible inside the building, with galleries and visitors (and, soon, works of art) suspended together in the air over Wilshire Boulevard, in the geographic heart of Los Angeles, is singularly moving. The wing also offers striking views and even reflections of itself as it bends across the street; it’s in these moments that you’re glad the building is vain and even preening, very much aware that it’s on display.

All in all—after all this time, money, and Sturm und Drang—Los Angeles is easily the better for having it. The city, long known as welcoming to experimental architecture, especially in its residential realm, has become more constrained and conservative in recent years, not to mention an exceptionally expensive place to build. L.A.’s leading cultural institutions have long been guilty of commissioning rather safe and uninspired buildings, with the great exception of Disney Hall; but over the last generation or so, the gap between the city’s hospitality to cultural forms requiring relatively little upfront capital (the visual arts, food, and music, to name three) and its openness to innovative architecture has widened to an alarming degree. It has been a punishing road for Govan and Zumthor to get here. But the completed building, for all its faults, is an encouraging sign that Los Angeles is still capable of architectural risk-taking at key sites and the biggest scale.

Punch List is published weekly. Subscribe free here, or sign up for a paid subscription, with bonus material, here. Up next: A review of A Moratorium on New Construction (Sternberg Press), by Charlotte Malterre-Barthes.

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