The Triumphant New LACMA Has The Potential To Rewrite Art History

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is about to open the most consequential building in its recent history, and the question it poses is larger than architecture: Can a museum present art history as something layered, global, and non-linear without losing clarity for visitors? The answer, at least in the David Geffen Galleries, appears to be yes.

The new building opens to members on April 19 and to the public on May 4. Designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, the one-level structure is the result of a 25-year campus overhaul that has long divided opinion in Los Angeles. The final price tag reached $724 million, including $125 million from LA County.

What makes the project notable is not only its scale, but its curatorial logic. LACMA's 15 curatorial departments are no longer locked into fixed zones. Works can be installed anywhere in the building, allowing objects from different centuries, regions, and traditions to meet in ways that challenge the old museum habit of separating European art from everything else. The result is a more fluid reading of the collection, one that reflects how many museums are now trying to move beyond a strictly linear narrative of progress.

That flexibility is unusual in a building this monumental. The galleries are housed in concrete and organized on a single level, with 26 interior galleries shaped to accommodate LACMA's holdings rather than impose a rigid hierarchy on them. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill handled the seismic engineering, allowing the structure to sway five feet in any direction without compromising its integrity - a practical necessity in Los Angeles, but also a reminder that the building is meant to endure.

The museum's outdoor grounds extend the same ambition into the open air. Rodin sculptures stand alongside Alexander Calder's Three Quintains (Hello Girls) and Jeff Koons's Spilt-Rocker, reinforcing the sense that the campus is being asked to function less like a sequence of departments and more like a field of encounters.

The road to this opening was not smooth. The design drew criticism early and often, and revisions made after an environmental report reduced exhibition space by about 10,000 square feet. Yet the finished building now gives LACMA something it has long lacked: a spatial framework that matches the museum's increasingly global ambitions. Whether visitors experience that as liberating or disorienting may depend on how they move through it, but the institution has clearly chosen to make art history feel less fixed, and more alive.

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