LACMA DAVID GEFFEN GALLERIES: $835M BET ON A NEW MUSEUM

## $835 Million, Four Demolished Buildings, One Pulitzer-Winning Critic The Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Knight won a 2020 Pulitzer Prize for his critiques of this building plan. That is a useful fact to hold onto. The David Geffen Galleries at LACMA open today, April 19, 2026, and the argument about whether they should exist is not over. It never will be. Development and construction of the David Geffen Galleries is funded by the Building LACMA campaign, which has raised $793 million to date, exceeding its initial $750 million fundraising goal, inclusive of the building cost of $715 million. The Geffen Galleries, which will cost a reported $835 million all-in, with $125 million coming from Los Angeles County, are made of poured-in-place concrete, with details largely in bronze. That is a staggering number for any public institution, let alone one in a city still recovering from catastrophic January 2025 wildfires. Govan worked tirelessly to drum up support and money for the building, securing $150 million from media mogul David Geffen, the largest individual cash donation in the museum's history. Elaine Wynn gave $50 million, and $125 million came from LA County taxpayer funds. The building carries Geffen's name, which tells you something about how cultural institutions negotiate power in 2026. ## Peter Zumthor's First American Building, 17 Years After He Started The David Geffen Galleries were designed by Peter Zumthor, the Pritzker Prize-winning Swiss architect known for stark, spare buildings that emphasize light, material, and contemplation. Though Zumthor lived in Los Angeles and briefly taught at SCI-Arc in the 1980s, this is his first completed building in the United States. Zumthor began initial studies of the east side of the campus in 2009, eventually releasing the first design for the David Geffen Galleries in 2013. Following the release, the building went through a major redesign in 2014 to prevent damaging the nearby La Brea Tar Pits, with additional renderings released in 2017. Seventeen years from first sketch to opening day. The Getty Center, Richard Meier's other great West LA monument, took roughly the same arc. Neither project came cheap in dollars or controversy. Zumthor calls the building a "concrete sculpture." It consists of a single, massive gallery level lifted thirty feet in the air atop seven stout legs that hold, among other spaces, a shop, restaurant, and auditorium. The new building, a 275-meter-long, curved glass-and-concrete structure, stretches along Hancock Park and crosses Wilshire Boulevard, housing the permanent collection across 10,220 square meters of gallery space elevated nearly 9 meters above street level. Zumthor's original 2013 concept was dubbed The Black Flower, but the design was compromised over the years, with the building shifting from dark concrete to pale sand-colored stone, and its square footage has also shrunk, with Zumthor even distancing himself from the design. That last detail is extraordinary: the architect whose name is on a building reportedly stepped back from the finished product. It is the kind of institutional friction that rarely gets named out loud. ## 45 Curators, Four Oceans, Zero Chronological Order The architecture is one argument. The curators inside it are making a different one, and it is the more radical of the two. Rather than displaying artworks according to medium or period, the inaugural installation uses the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans and the Mediterranean Sea as its organizing framework, emphasizing the cultural exchange, migration, and commerce prevalent throughout the history of art. Forty-five curators working across areas of study collaborated on the initial installation, which is designed to hold approximately 2,500 to 3,000 objects from the museum's global collection at one time, filling 110,000 square feet of gallery space. Rather than replicate the 19th-century Beaux-Arts model, in which rooms were confined to a single discipline, culture, or era, LACMA's 45 curators were invited to reconsider how the museum's holdings might communicate across multiple sightlines and adjacencies, animating new connections and questioning fixed notions of history. The idea that bodies of water, not centuries or civilizations, should organize a museum collection was not handed down from the director. A structuring principle that was first proposed by the museum's junior curators, using bodies of water as curatorial nodes, emerged as a powerful way to enliven the collection. Junior curators proposed the framework that will now define how millions of visitors encounter art history. That is worth pausing on. A staggering 78 enclosed galleries and unbounded displays laid out around the flowing perimeter are arranged according to themes such as "Indigenismo in Latin America," "Car Culture," "From Kashmir to Cashmere," and "The Ancient Mediterranean: Merging Beliefs." Visitors encounter artists such as Henri Matisse, Betye Saar, Francis Bacon, Diego Rivera, and Katsushika Hokusai, alongside contemporary voices like Do Ho Suh and Lauren Halsey, whose work channels the architectural and cultural rhythms of Los Angeles itself. ## The Controversy That Funded Full-Page New York Times Ads This building has enemies. Real ones, with checkbooks. Those concerns coalesced in Save LACMA, a nonprofit formed in 2020 to oppose the plan. Full-page advertisements appeared in major newspapers, including the New York Times and L.A. Times. Some critics took issue with the design, and others argued that the project sacrificed institutional memory and architectural range for a building they saw as too idiosyncratic. The Ahmanson Foundation, longtime donors, stopped giving art to the museum in 2020 over concerns about LACMA's new direction. When a major foundation withdraws from an institution it helped build, the disagreement is no longer about aesthetics. It is about identity. About who LACMA is for and whose version of art history gets to stand 30 feet above Wilshire Boulevard. The main complaints are these: the 82-year-old Zumthor, having never worked in the U.S. or at anything like this scale, is the wrong architect for the job; Govan handpicked him in secret; and the design they have produced together threatens to turn LACMA, the region's only encyclopedic museum, into a shrunken, less serious, and more debt-laden version of itself. With the 110,000 square feet of exhibition space in the David Geffen Galleries, LACMA will have 220,000 square feet of galleries, a significant increase from its 130,000 square feet in 2007. The expansion-versus-contraction debate was always partly a numbers fight, and those numbers favor Govan's position. ## LEED Gold, a Metro Stop, and an Erewhon Under the Galleries The campus transformation has a sustainability dimension that rarely gets the same headlines as the controversy. Designed to achieve LEED Gold certification, the project replaces inefficient structures with low-carbon concrete, radiant heating and cooling, natural ventilation, and long-term resource-conservation strategies. More than 95% of construction and demolition waste has been diverted from landfills. The new building also arrives alongside a major transit change: the Wilshire/Fairfax Metro station, one of three new stops on the Metro D (Purple) line, opens on May 8. A museum that previously required a car to reach becomes accessible by subway for the first time. In Los Angeles, that is not a minor logistical footnote. And then there's Erewhon, which has garnered almost as much controversy as the building itself. Located in its own glass box under the galleries, next to the Calder fountain, the LACMA branch of the infamous high-end eatery will offer organic coffee, pastries, smoothies, and cold-pressed juices. Zumthor designed an architecture of contemplation and radical egalitarianism. The tenant list includes arguably Los Angeles's most expensive grocery store. That tension is either deeply funny or deeply revealing, depending on your appetite for institutional irony. The museum brings its public program into high gear on June 20, when Los Angeles gallerist Jeffrey Deitch runs his legendary Art Parade featuring artists, performers, and musicians on Wilshire Boulevard. By summer 2026, the building will have moved from ribbon-cutting to block party. LACMA is betting the programming will outlast the debate. The most honest read on the David Geffen Galleries is this: the building is a $835 million institutional wager that Los Angeles deserves a museum organized around its own logic, not borrowed from Paris or New York. "There's no one path through the museum, just as there's no one story of art history," Govan said. Whether that philosophy justifies two decades of conflict and a nine-figure bill from county taxpayers, visitors walking across Wilshire Boulevard will start answering that question today.