Once, when I was 12 or 13, I was looking at Fernand Léger’s 1925 painting Composition in the European wing of LACMA’s since-demolished Ahmanson Building when I noticed a small termite crawling across the surface. Slightly alarmed, I notified an elderly gallery attendant, who, upon examining the painting for a moment for herself, conjured a crumbled Kleenex from the pocket of her windbreaker and flicked the bug away in an efficient swoop. This was probably not her first rodeo.
By my recollection at least, the 1960s William Pereira buildings that LACMA’s director Michael Govan ruthlessly obliterated in a peak lockdown 2020 demolition were insufficient in every regard. It’s not hard to believe Govan’s claims during a 2016 panel with Peter Zumthor that potentially preserving them would be almost impossible, and at the very least impractical and expensive. There have been no shortage of critics, particularly Christopher Knight in The Los Angeles Times and Joseph Giovannini in The Los Angeles Review of Books, outlining how nearly every step of Govan and Zumthor’s collaboration to reduce the West Coast’s greatest encyclopedic museum into a unilevel blob has been marked by confusing oversights, design compromises, and the inexplicable vanishing of square footage.
That said, the new David Geffen Galleries, which were open to the public for a week this summer sans-art in anticipation for their formal inauguration next year, are undoubtedly the most significant thing to happen in Miracle Mile—which, at this point has become the city’s corridor of choice for Dubai-level architectural stunts like the Academy Museum’s Renzo Piano-designed Death Star auditorium and the Peterson Museum’s flaming red homage to a Hard Rock Hotel—since LACMA’s formation in the 60s. The new LACMA building’s sweeping curved glass facade catches afternoon light in a dazzling scatter, almost blinding enough to distract from its repetitious concrete weightiness.
David Geffen Galleries at LACMA; view from exhibition level northwest with Heizer’s Levitated Mass (2012) in background. Photo: © Iwan Baan.
Inside the building, 26 rectangular vaults with single doorways (a couple of them with comically low clearances under 6 feet) are interspersed with polygonal “courtyard galleries.” The vistas formed by the building’s glass perimeter vary from an objectively cool birds eye view of Wilshire Boulevard, to a mildly invasive view of the second-floor balconies of a housing development on the museum’s Southern edge. Wandering the perimeter of the building is an easier sell than actually entering the galleries, the interiors of which exceed brutalist restraint and are closer to something like hostility. After hearing Govan publicly tout Zumthor as a “master of light and space” for almost a decade, the stifling, monotonous tone of the galleries’ interiors is a bit disappointing, as earlier design iterations released to the public included double-height vault galleries with ceiling cutouts to siphon light into at least some of the spaces.
Another confusing departure from the earlier concept are the entrances. In the original model revealed to the public in 2013, the sweeping arms of the building (which at that point was roughly the footprint of the Aphex Twin logo) created a convex curve in near perfect alignment with the existing bright red Renzo Piano-designed open air entrance pavilion. After it was decided that the museum would cross Wilshire and the blob shape was streamlined, any attempt to align the building with the existing plaza was scrapped.
There is also no trace of the museum’s “building without a back” concept, which was touted at the 2016 panel by Govan. In the initial model, the museum had up to seven entrances from ground-level “cores,” which might have created a truly multimodal experience for the viewer. Instead, visitors walk from the ticket counter about 200 feet diagonally through a mostly barren concrete landscape (the ground is paved with a monumental work titled Feathered Changes by Mariana Castillo Deball that spans the entire building), to a less-than-ceremonious stairwell reminiscent of an emergency exit to enter the galleries. This alignment is clunky and makes the building feel both too close and too far away from the rest of the campus. I fear the landscaping might also be uninspired (though it’s still in progress)—because sand colored palm trees that recall a monochrome SKIMS campaign feature prominently.
David Geffen Galleries at LACMA; view from exhibition level northwest with Heizer’s Levitated Mass (2012) in background. Photo: © Iwan Baan.
Ultimately, the whole idea of a soft opening to celebrate an empty building feels misguided. It provides plenty of fuel for critics of Govan who have maintained that his vision for the museum prioritizes style (the building) over substance (the collection). LACMA has big plans for the collection, too. The Geffen Galleries will forgo the 19th-century compartmentalization of encyclopedic museums by region and time period, instead integrating works from all of the museum’s departments throughout the galleries. LACMA has already proved this can actually be exciting. The museum’s most risky show (by far) in recent memory was 2020’s “NOT I: Throwing Voices (1500 BCE–2020 CE)”, a modestly sized encyclopedic survey of the collection organized by Jose Luis Blondet (who has since left for MOCA), organized around the idea of ventriloquism. Presented in the museum’s Resnick Pavilion, a video by Puppies Puppies (Jade Guaruno Kuriki-Olivo) was shown a couple feet away from an Honoré Daumier lithograph.
Potential for anything remotely as institutionally fresh is going to be difficult in the new Geffen Galleries, as it would be almost impossible to replicate Blondet’s highly detailed approach across 110,000 square feet with the voices of multiple department heads holistically taken into account. The building Govan has opted for, while impressive, is materially rigid and conceptually inflexible, with even more stubbornness baked into its DNA than even the most severe of encyclopedic museums. It’s an effective departure from the 19th-century ideal of the museum as colonial reliquary, but it undermines its mission by clinging closely to equally unfashionable modernist ideals of the building as architecture-as-sculpture, a concrete staging ground for rarefied and intangible encounters with the works it houses, indifferent to its surrounding urban landscape or museological imperatives.
In the early 1990s, Govan worked under his mentor Thomas Krens (then director of The Guggenheim), as the museum was undergoing its Frank Gehry-designed expansion in Bilbao, Spain. At the time, Bilbao was a struggling post-industrial economy, desperate for the tourism boost that the radical Gehry building had the potential to produce. The project was a critical and economic success, and what ensued was possibly the most famous example of the trope of successful museum expansions by respected starchitects. The new galleries hold clear reverence for this playbook, but it’s plainly apparent that when it comes to large-scale projects, Zumthor is no Gehry. Public consensus on the Geffen Galleries is still up in the air, though Govan’s decision to so dramatically sacrifice function for form makes one wonder if he views Los Angeles’s public of 2025 as equally provincial to Bilbao’s in 1990.