From the beginning, the plans for the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art building have been a private collaboration between Director Michael Govan and the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. This latest chapter in the quest for a new building for the county museum began at a preview I attended in the LACMA auditorium for the exhibition The Presence of the Past on June 3, 2013. More than a preview, it was a show of its own for a project that had advanced without public review, all the way to finalizing the mass, the shape and the exterior circulation of an apparently unconventional new building.