LACMA's David Geffen Galleries Open April 19 and They Might Change How America Thinks About Museums

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art will open the David Geffen Galleries on April 19, 2026, completing a transformation that has been in the works for the better part of two decades and cost nearly $724 million. Designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Swiss architect Peter Zumthor in collaboration with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the building is unlike anything currently standing in the American museum landscape. It is a single-story structure that spans Wilshire Boulevard on elevated piers, stretching 274 meters across one of the busiest corridors in Los Angeles. The galleries sit above the street rather than beside it, creating a continuous exhibition space that eliminates the stairways, elevators, and multi-floor layouts that define nearly every other major museum in the country. The design choice is not just architectural preference. It is a philosophical statement about how art should be experienced.

The horizontal layout does something radical by museum standards. It puts everything on the same level. There is no hierarchy of floors where European painting lives above contemporary art which lives above photography which lives in the basement next to the gift shop. Every work in the permanent collection exists on the same plane, in galleries that flow into one another without the hard separations that traditional museum architecture imposes between periods, regions, and mediums. Zumthor has said that the building is designed to allow curators to create narratives that shift over time, responding to scholarship, acquisitions, and cultural conversations rather than being locked into a fixed arrangement determined by the physical structure. The idea is that a visitor walking through the galleries will encounter connections between works that a more compartmentalized building would never allow.

The building itself targets LEED Gold certification and incorporates sustainability features that go beyond token gestures. Low-carbon concrete was used throughout the structure, and the climate control system relies on radiant heating and cooling rather than forced air, which reduces energy consumption and provides more stable conditions for the artworks. Natural ventilation is integrated into the design where possible, and the landscaping uses climate-adapted vegetation that minimizes water use. For a building in Los Angeles, where drought conditions and energy costs are ongoing concerns, these choices are practical as much as they are principled. The fact that a museum of this scale can be built with these standards should set a precedent for institutional construction projects going forward.

The expansion adds roughly 10,220 square meters of exhibition space to LACMA's campus, bringing the total gallery footprint from approximately 130,000 square feet to 220,000 square feet across the museum's 20-acre site. The ground floor of the building includes retail and restaurant spaces, which addresses a longstanding criticism that museums treat their commercial functions as afterthoughts rather than integrating them into the visitor experience. The decision to put shopping and dining at street level while elevating the galleries above creates a natural separation between the commercial and contemplative aspects of a museum visit without forcing visitors to choose between them. You can grab lunch downstairs and then take the ramp up to the galleries, or you can bypass the ground floor entirely and enter the art directly.

The opening events will begin with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on April 19, followed by two weeks of priority access for LACMA members and donors running through May 3. The general public opening will follow, and the museum has already announced that the inaugural installation will draw broadly from its permanent collection rather than relying on a single blockbuster loan exhibition. This is another deliberate choice. Rather than competing with other museums for a traveling show that would generate headlines and long lines, LACMA is betting that its own collection, displayed in a building designed specifically to showcase it, is compelling enough to draw crowds on its own merits. Given the depth of the collection, which spans 6,000 years of art history and includes more than 149,000 objects, that bet seems sound.

Peter Zumthor is 82 years old, and the David Geffen Galleries may be the last major building he completes. His career has been defined by an approach to architecture that prioritizes atmosphere, material honesty, and the emotional experience of being inside a space, and the LACMA project is arguably the largest canvas he has ever worked with. Whether you visit the building as an architecture enthusiast, an art lover, or someone who simply wants to see what $724 million and two decades of planning look like in person, the David Geffen Galleries represent something worth paying attention to. They are an argument, built in concrete and glass, that the museum as an institution can still evolve, and that the way we move through a building shapes what we see, what we feel, and what we remember long after we leave.