A Museum in a Prehistoric Site

Los Angeles is often described as a city that developed laterally rather than vertically, stitched together by boulevards and freeways rather than towers. The new David Geffen Galleries at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) take this horizontality as its genesis. The entire gallery is contained within a single floor — a continuous concrete slab extending nearly 280m across the site, lifted nine meters above the ground and hovering over Wilshire Boulevard. It speaks directly to LACMA director Michael Govan’s vision of visitors wandering through art as one might meander through a park.

The building is designed by the Pritzker Prize–winning Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. Govan was introduced to Zumthor by the late artist Walter De Maria more than 20 years ago, and together they worked to materialize this ambition.

Set within the LACMA campus in the Miracle Mile district, the new building sits alongside the ancient La Brea Tar Pits, a prehistoric landscape of fossils and bubbling asphalt. This setting was what captivated Zumthor during the early stages of the planning. He envisioned the building as an oil-slick form, perhaps imagining black concrete spreading across the ground and slowly flowing toward the pit.

Creating a Home for Each Object

The flowing form continues into the elevated gallery space, which Zumthor designed “from the inside out.” The floor-to-ceiling glass panels allow in “the most noble light.” The intense Californian sunlight is filtered through curtains crafted by Japanese textile designer Reiko Sudo. The sheer, gossamer fabric diffuses the light into a gentle glow within the galleries, while turning the panoramic view outside into a dreamlike blur. Polished dark gray concrete floors flecked with tiny shells catch and reflect light and color.

As for the exhibition, traditional frameworks of geography, chronology and medium are reimagined as fluid, multi¬faceted groupings. The collection’s narratives are organized around four major bodies of water — the Pacific, Indian, Mediterranean and Atlantic — which connected cultures through trade and migration long before air travel. Zumthor created a home for each object, and a series of enclosed galleries within the continuous floor provide darker, controlled environments for light sensitive works. Ceilings and most walls are left as cast concrete, while some interior walls are tinted deep terracotta, indigo or “nuanced black” (dark gray) to intensify the atmosphere. Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquities, Buddhist art, a 1960s car, modern furniture, and works by Hokusai, Matisse, Francis Bacon and Andreas Gursky all share this single plane of circulation.

Several new commissions punctuate these narratives, including Korean artist Do Ho Suh’s life size reconstruction of a section of Gyeongbokgung Palace, made from translucent fabric over a slender metal armature. Visitors move through these works as they might through Los Angeles’s multicultural neighborhoods, drifting between scenes and perspectives.

Hollywood’s Cultural Fabric

At ground level, a restaurant, shop, education spaces and a theatre are housed in seven supporting pavilions. The hovering slab also provides 3.5 acres of shaded public plaza for flexible use. The aim of the museum is to encourage local communities, especially younger audiences, to visit, linger and take part in programs that extend beyond the galleries.

Beyond the park like campus, three additional LACMA buildings come into view: the Pavilion for Japanese Art designed by American architect Bruce Goff, and the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) and the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion, both designed by Pritzker Prize–winning Italian architect Renzo Piano. Piano is also the architect of the neigh¬boring Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, underscoring that this is very much a piece of Hollywood’s cultural fabric.

The new LACMA building cost in excess of $724 million to construct, with about 80 percent funded by private donors; the largest single gift, $150 million from music and film mogul David Geffen, is acknowledged in the building’s name. The vast concrete structure has been contentious, particularly in environmental debates, yet its solidity suggests it could endure for centuries, even if the institution itself were one day to close.

Standing here, within sight of the bubbling La Brea Tar Pits, where mammoth fossils dating from roughly 11,000 to 50,000 years ago have been excavated, it’s hard not to feel how fleeting our own moment is in the planet’s history.