Zumthor earns his L.A. stripes

More than 16 years after I started writing about the project, and almost a year after I launched Punch List with the first published review of the complete but empty building, Peter Zumthor’s $724 million remake of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is finally scrubbed clean, full of art, and ready, beginning Sunday, to meet its public. Along with a handful of influencers and several other art and architecture critics—including my former L.A. Times colleague Christopher Knight, who won a Pulitzer Prize in criticism for essays railing against Zumthor’s design­ and emerged from retirement to serenely tour his bête noire with the rest of us—I spent several hours Wednesday inside the building, which is officially called the David Geffen Galleries.

So how is it?

Thanks for asking! I’ll spare you the lengthy backstory, which you can find in my earlier piece and a bunch of other places, so we can get right down to it: