Architects on the Geffen Galleries
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| Iwan Baan photo of Peter Zumthor's David Geffen Galleries, LACMA |
The Architect's Newspaper surveys 27 architects and influencers on Peter Zumthor's new David Geffen Galleries at LACMA. By my quick tally, 10 of the reviews are positive; 2 are negative; and 15 are mixed or evasive.
Here's Michael Maltzan's positive reaction:
"Big, curvy, floating—for all the seeming detachments to the surrounding scene, Peter Zumthor’s new building at LACMA does everything to sidestep those preconceptions and criticisms. It can be slippery, it can be heavy-handed, sometimes both simultaneously, but it pushes and pulls the city around it into an undeniable conversation. … Putting aside exterior form for a moment, it’s ‘up there’ on the lifted plane of galleries where the design’s real newness resides. Here one meanders and weaves between city and art, simultaneously challenging and celebrating both. Can one be a flaneur inside a building?"
The prickliest review is Michael Bohn's:
"Los Angeles is notorious for commissioning world-renowned architects with less-than-ideal outcomes. This appears to be the case for LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries designed by Peter Zumthor, and I would argue the same for the adjacent Broad Contemporary Art Museum by Renzo Piano. I admired Peter Zumthor’s precise and tactile work when visiting his Therme Vals spa in Switzerland and the Kolumba Museum in Cologne. Possibly the pressures of value engineering, patron demands, political caution, and lack of attention to detailing makes design excellence difficult to achieve here. Perhaps decision-makers are more interested in the designer label rather than the value of the product"
Nobody had kind words for William Pereira's demolished campus. But Meara Daly and Joe Day each wistfully invoked Rem Koolhaas/OMA's never-built 2001 design for LACMA. Day writes,
"Opening between two museums overtly about film—the Academy of Motion Pictures Museum (2021) and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art (2026)—Zumthor’s LACMA expansion is ironically the most cinematic of the three. And it should have been even more so. … Had LACMA built OMA’s more audacious, ‘x,y,z’ scheme, L.A. could have hosted an encyclopedic museum as reimagined by Godard. Instead, looking out from its hovering plenum, we see Midtown, especially the rest of Museum Mile, as if reshot by Antonioni. I suspect most won’t mind that trade. Another prediction: It’s best now, empty."
The Geffen Galleries open to members Apr. 19 and to the public May 3, 2026.
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| Rem Koolhaas' 2001 design for LACMA |
Comments
Is that asking too much?
My first thought hearing of Zumthor’s design was that he was taking Koolhaas’s idea and raising it on legs, keeping the entire collection on a single plane while giving LA that horizontal view of the city we love in our postmodern residential architecture, for which we are famous. But there doesn’t seem to be any linear progression inside the building, only the weave that Koolhaas offered, which is a real loss, because Koolhaas showed how we could have had both.
> for William Pereira's
> demolished campus.
LA lacking a separate publicly owned-operated museum of art until the 1960s was one big glitch that made the city come off like a so-called cultural wasteland. Certainly when smaller urban areas like St Louis, Detroit, Minneapolis had managed to build one in the early 1900s or even late 1800s.
San Francisco's Legion of Honor (1924) to the north and San Diego's Museum of Art (1926) to the south made LA the last man standing. Then to compound the embarrassment, William Pereira in 1965 designed a complex that had too many levels, too many separate buildings (still a problem) and an overall look that Mies van der Rohe (the guy who LACMA's director at the time favored) probably would have handled with more skill.
Its original pools and fountains to me were the only saving grace, a format that riffed on the US Science Pavilion for the Seattle World's Fair and designed by the same architect who did NYC's World Trade Center.
I saw a post a few weeks ago from someone who said that when she lived in LA, she took out-of-town guests to LACMA and the 1965-1986 campus was a (to paraphrase) a flop.
A few years ago, a visitor from Minnesota reviewed (I think in yelp) LACMA and compared it unfavorably with her city's Minneapolis Institute of Art.
If a museum's collection is top notch, its setting can be less ideal. Or if its setting is top notch, its collection can be more middling. LACMA has been weak in its setting and non-Louvre-like in its collection. It lacks objects like the huge ancient Egyptian sculptures (or temple too) in the Met on 5th or the even larger objects in the new Grand Egyptian Museum.
If William Pereira in 1965 had a sense of such things and places (museums too), they apparently impressed him less than Southern Calif's tract houses did.
I'm prepared in 2026 in certain ways to have to observe Peter Zumthor (and Michael Govan) not crossing his t's or dotting his i's either. But LACMA 2026 will probably end up much better than LACMA 1965.
I did like the opinions that emphasized the filmic aspect of the ribbon of windows. However, none of them were astute enough to mention the architectural precedent for this --- the Parthenon Frieze showing the Panathenaic Procession. The ribbon of windows is the live-action version of that sculptural promenade.
Govan got a Greek temple after all.
--- J. Garcin