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LACMA’s Bold New Wing Can’t Quite Escape Its Own Contradictions

CEO Michael Govan's vision of a "subjectively diverse" museum experience is an ambitious one, but the gap between ideals and institutional realities is difficult to ignore.

Talk of a new building for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art goes back at least 25 years, when Rem Koolhaas OMA presented a plan that proposed a full razing of William Pereira’s 1965 campus and replacing it with a single tent-like structure. That never happened, but Pritzker Award-winning architect Peter Zumthor’s idea for an inkspot, or black rose as it was also called, did. Controversy swirled from the start, with critics lambasting the price tag, estimated at $724 million, including $125 million of public money, for a plan the LA Times compared to a small city airport. Never mind that at 110,000 square feet, it was approximately 10,000 feet smaller than the original building, leading the same paper to dub it “the incredible shrinking museum.”

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Love it or not, the new David Geffen Galleries, an elevated single-story structure that sprawls like an amoeba across Wilshire Boulevard, is a generally well-received addition to the city’s landscape and a must-see for art lovers. Sepulchral spaces varying in size give way to panoramic views of the city through textile designer Reiko Sudo’s metallic curtains, which protect the artwork from harmful rays but often admit reflective glare. Home to the permanent collection, roughly 155,000 objects spanning 6,000 years, of which........

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