The first photos of Peter Zumthor’s long-awaited LACMA expansion

A new piece is added to the twenty-year expansion program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), aimed at transforming the museum complex into an increasingly inclusive campus, pulsating with cultural and social energy. Who adds it is Peter Zumthor (Pritzker Prize 2009), designing the David Geffen Galleries: the future home of the museum’s permanent collections and some of its main operational functions.

The work is part of the path already traced by Renzo Piano Building Workshop with the construction of the two buildings on the north side of Wilshire Boulevard, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum-BCAM (2008) and the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion (2010). The sinuous concrete and glass building undulating along Hancock Park and across Wilshire Boulevard is a manifesto of the Swiss master's bare but powerfully expressive vocabulary, so that the apparently cold narrative tone warms up with a strong emotional drive, thanks to the play of light shaping rarefied spaces and skinny surfaces, in a continuous sublimation of the essential.

The two-story volume, highlighted by a clearly legible exposed concrete structure with a marked horizontal trend that "compresses" continuous bands of windows, includes fluid and interconnected exhibition spaces without a hierarchical layout, as well as educational spaces, a theater and commercial areas. In anticipation of the inauguration, scheduled for April 2026, the building and its surroundings are starting to come to life with outdoor sculpture installations (including Split-Rocker, a monumental sculpture by Jeff Koons composed of flowers and plants recently acquired), catering and commercial spaces and special preview events. Among the latter, in particular between 26 and 28 June 2025 the building was exceptionally opened to the public on the occasion of a musical performance by saxophonist and composer Kamasi Washington, which attracted hundreds of musicians, artists, philanthropists, art lovers and simply curious people to take a peek (and experience live) what will be the city's new cultural stage.