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 4, 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
"The distinct geometry of that security fence—a continuous palisade of green spikes—is surprisingly present. It has one particularly unfortunate effect: From outside, it now feels a bit like you’re looking into a zoo enclosure. "
-David Heymann, David Heymann, Architect/University of Texas at Austin
"An Audacious $724 Million Building Reinvents LACMA"
... “This is one of the most important museum buildings to have been completed in the last quarter-century by virtue of its scale, ambition, quality and promise,” said Glenn D. Lowry, the longtime director of the Museum of Modern Art, in New York. [Lowry oversaw the recent DS+R renovation of MoMA.]
... “This is intended to be a cabinet of curiosities that brings things together,” Govan, 62, said during a walk-through this week. “It’s intended to make your mind look at all the different perspectives around you. That is very much about our moment: Look at everything.”
... While there were cost-saving adjustments that Zumthor openly resisted, the Pritzker-winning architect said he was satisfied with the outcome: “I have realized my vision.”
... The LA artist Jonas Wood will appreciate the photo showing the shadows of Greek vases against the concrete walls. It should remind him of his Greek Vase II. Also pictured is the Hope Athena --- on the promenade, presiding over the city.
--- J. Garcin
MoMA has failed at every iteration of its expansions for decades to make any shift away from its warren of overly small rooms, where one gets virtually mugged by the hordes who are simply passing through. It's embarrassing. The collection deserves better than Lowry and his fellow nincompoops[sp?]!!!
Over 60 years ago it was:
https://unframed.lacma.org/2010/03/30/happy-birthday-dear-lacma
> We’re considering reinstating
> a dress code for visiting the
> museum. No fur, no admission.
LOL.
The culture since 1965 has really changed, both less sophisticated in the past (although museum goers nowadays in PR images would be shown wearing flip flops), but in 2026 also not necessarily way better either: LA's signature industry (represented by the museum west of LACMA) is currently being described as collapsing, and other local urban problems, including the huge fires last year, are a big black eye.
I had relatives from Michigan visiting LA around 2014-15 and they mentioned planning to drop by LACMA. At the time, I didn't grimace about its Pereira/Hardy-Holzman-Pfeiffer layout the way I would now. It's also because I wasn't more fully aware of their region's Detroit Institute of Arts---which I'm sure they had visited. Even though I've long been aware that things weren't adding up right, I realize my view of LACMA 1965-1986 was more like that of a person who's yet to fall off the turnip truck.
> unfortunate effect:
I've always liked LACMA's thin green metal-post fencing, Not having horizontal bars helps make it recede. The design is different compared with that of a typical gate. The obvious opposite extreme would be a really cheap-looking chain-link fence, which I notice has been allowed in sections of the LA Zoo, verboten in the San Diego Zoo.
The problem the small rooms pose is partly structural, partly curatorial, and partly operational. There are structural constraints (columns) that dictate the size of galleries, particularly in the original section. The original section has an open plan (movable partitions), but it is not a column-free space.
On some of the floors, the curators have partitioned the space deliberately to create small rooms. I assume they have a pedagogical reason for doing so.
MoMA compounds the problem by selling too many tickets. It's always been this way. When Pelli renovated the place in the 80's, I am sure he did not intend for his lobby to look like a subway station, but it did because of the sheer number of people entering/existing the building. The Taniguchi renovation did not make things better. Diller moved the museum store below grade, thus opening up the ground floor. It's a major improvement.
--- J. Garcin
I've seen this written many times by Nagourney and Pogrebin in the NYT, which I can't help but find laughable.
LA funded the Academy Museum, the new building for the Oschin, and expansions for Hammer, Natural History Museum and La Brea Tar Pits, all around the same time, all competing for the same donors, all within the past few years in addition to LACMA, which was a ridiculous sum alone nearing a billion dollars. Why does NYT feel LA cultural philanthropy is stingy compared to other cities? Because to me, that's a ridiculous number of capital campaigns that were were all successfully raised.