LACMA's big new galleries

Los Angeles is about to let people walk through a museum building that crosses Wilshire Boulevard like a bridge, with its main galleries lifted nearly 30 feet above the street. The David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art open on April 19, 2026, after roughly six years of construction and a planning process that stretched across two decades. (lacma.org) (nytimes.com) The shape is the part that has made people argue for years. Swiss architect Peter Zumthor designed a 900-foot-long concrete-and-glass building that curves along Hancock Park and spans the boulevard instead of sitting like a box on one side of the campus. (lacma.org) (archdaily.com) Inside, the museum is changing the usual script. The new building puts almost all of its 110,000 square feet of exhibition space on a single level, so curators are not forced into the old upstairs-downstairs ranking of “important” departments and visitors are not pushed through one fixed route. (lacma.org) (archdaily.com) That one-floor plan also changes how LACMA tells art history. Rather than sorting everything into neat period rooms by medium, region, or century, the inaugural installation uses the flat layout to place different traditions beside each other and let visitors make connections across time and geography. (nytimes.com) (laartsonline.com) The money behind it is almost as big as the building. The project cost nearly $724 million, and LACMA has said more than 80% of that total was privately funded even though the building will be owned by Los Angeles County. (aol.com) (lacma.org) A few numbers show how much this remakes the campus. Before this project, LACMA had about 130,000 square feet of gallery space; with the David Geffen Galleries, the museum says it will have about 220,000 square feet across its 20-acre site. (archdaily.com) (lacma.org) The ground level is not just lobby space tucked under the art. LACMA says seven semi-transparent pavilions below the elevated galleries hold restaurants and cafes, a store, educational facilities, and a 300-seat theater, turning the underside of the building into a public zone instead of dead space. (archdaily.com) (lacma.org) The most emotional object in the opening may be a fountain, not a painting. Alexander Calder’s Three Quintains (Hello Girls), which LACMA first commissioned for its 1965 opening in Hancock Park, has been reinstalled more than 60 years later at the northeast corner of the new building. (latimes.com) (hoodline.com) That return ties the new building to the museum LACMA used to be before demolitions and redesign fights turned the campus into a long-running civic argument. The David Geffen Galleries are opening with a Calder work from 1965 at one edge and Jeff Koons’s flower-covered Split-Rocker newly planted outside, which is a very Los Angeles way to say the museum wants old landmarks and new spectacle at the same time. (latimes.com) (lacma.org) The opening itself is being staged in waves instead of one big public crush. April 19 starts with a ribbon-cutting and member access, members and donors get priority entry through May 3, and May 3 includes a free day for NexGenLA, the museum’s youth program for Los Angeles County residents age 17 and under. (lacma.org) (unframed.lacma.org) What opens this month is not just a new wing with a donor’s name on it. It is Los Angeles betting that a museum can be a piece of city infrastructure too: part bridge, part park, part theater, part argument about how art should be seen. (nytimes.com) (archdaily.com)