The long anticipated wait of the new building at LACMA has been something I have been looking forward to for some time. This museum was the filed trip you had to attend when I was in school and it never disappointed. So walking into the Geffen Galleries wasn't just seeing a new building. It was watching a place I love reinvent itself completely.
The new building was designed by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, and it opened to the public on April 19, 2026. It is a single elevated exhibition floor — a 900-foot concrete-and-glass form that actually spans over Wilshire Boulevard, built as one continuous slab. It took close to two decades of planning between Zumthor and LACMA's director Michael Govan, ran around $724 million, and it's Zumthor's first finished building in the United States.
Instead of organizing the collection by period or region the way most museums do, the installation is arranged around the world's oceans — the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic, along with the Mediterranean. Forty-five curators worked on it, pulling from six thousand years of art. I didn't understand that framing until afterward, but once I did, the whole experience clicked. You genuinely flow from one collection into the next, with no hard borders, and there is always a surprise around the next corner.
For a second when I walked in, I thought the place was small. Then I started moving toward the back and realized how wrong I was. It keeps unfolding, and there are so many ways to move through it that it's easy to skip past things entirely. This is a museum that rewards slowing down.
A few choices about the space stayed with me.
The windows are the big one. The floor-to-ceiling glass means you see the work the way it would actually live in the real world, in real light, instead of sealed inside a white box. Toward the end of the day the light turns warm and the shadows stretch long across the floor, and no two visits are going to look the same. The walls do something just as important — they're finished in dark blues and reds on textured concrete instead of the usual white. Standing in there, I realized how unnatural an all-white room actually is, almost a cheap trick to make work pop harder than it really does. These walls just let the art be what it is.
The piece I came for was Jeff Koons' Split-Rocker. I'm a huge Koons fan, and seeing it in person was incredible. I didn't know until I saw it in person the whole thing is split right down the middle with a small chrome finish — and when I got close, I could see a little of the inner workings, the watering system that keeps the living flowers alive. That's what I love about his work. It's whimsical and it's an engineering project at the same time.
The rest of the visit was a string of moments like that. A Cleopatra sculpture whose drapery is genuinely insane up close, carved so fine you stop believing it's stone. A Van Gogh glowing under the real daylight. Henri Matisse's La Gerbe (1953), which makes sense the moment you realize the whole building, seen from above, looks like one of his cutouts. Diego Rivera hung in conversation with work from the other side of the planet. Carlos Almaraz's Crash in Phthalo Green (1984) — a fiery freeway crash under a radiant California sky, and a longtime favorite of mine. I learned later that Govan loved that one so much he kept it hanging in his own office.
For me it isn't always about chasing the most photorealistic image possible. I like a little grunge in the work. Sargent is the perfect example of doing it right — it looks realistic, but those soft edges are what give it a feeling. You start to get fatigued walking through one perfect painting after another. It's inspiring to watch perfectionism move across all of history, but I connect far more with a piece that catches a feeling than one that only reaches for precision. The other thing I noticed: aside from the Koons, I didn't really see anything made in the last ten years. That's the nature of a permanent collection, though. You wait, and you see what sticks.
I went on a Friday at 4pm, which is free for LA County residents, and caught the start of the museum's jazz night setting up — which looked like a perfect way to spend an evening. Parking was full, so I left the car at The Grove and walked over, and I'd do it again happily. One last thing worth saying: the design of the lower floor gives you so much open space underneath that you can wander the whole perimeter of the building and experience it even if you never go inside.
That spirit is something you feel the moment you step inside.
LACMA felt like home before. Standing in that warm late light, watching six thousand years of work breathe under real windows, it started to feel like the future too. This is the best gallery I have ever set foot in, and I already can't wait to go back and see how it evolves.
David Geffen Galleries at LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Art Permanent Collection | Architecture by Peter Zumthor Art | Light | Culture | Los Angeles
Location 5905 Wilshire Blvd Los Angeles, California 90036
Visit Free general admission for L.A. County residents during designated hours lacma.org
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