LACMA David Geffen Galleries

It took a controversial demolition and most of a decade, but Peter Zumthor’s vision for LACMA finally opened to the public in April 2026. The David Geffen Galleries replace four aging buildings with a single sculptural concrete floor that lifts the museum’s permanent collection one level off the ground and stretches right across Wilshire Boulevard.

Project Scope

The building is a roughly 100,000-square-foot exhibition level carried on concrete piers, part of an overall 347,500-square-foot structure that came in at about $723.8 million. Clark Construction Group served as general contractor, with structural and MEP engineering from SOM, executing a design that’s almost entirely cast in architectural concrete, the kind that becomes the finished surface and leaves no room for error on the pour.

The form is unusual on purpose. Instead of a stack of conventional galleries, Zumthor designed a single horizontal plane that meanders across the site and bridges a public street, with the collection displayed without the traditional hierarchy of fixed period rooms. That meant the concrete itself had to carry the architecture, since there’s little cladding to hide behind, and the spans crossing Wilshire required careful structural coordination to read as one continuous floating slab.

Why It Matters

The Geffen Galleries are the most consequential cultural construction project in Los Angeles in a generation, and one of the most demanding concrete builds of its era. At roughly $2,000 per square foot of gallery space, it tested how far architectural concrete can be pushed when the structure and the finish are the same thing, and it gave the trades involved a reference point for board-formed and exposed work at the highest level.

It also reshapes the cultural spine of mid-Wilshire, joining a cluster of recent L.A. institutions that includes the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures a short walk away. After years of debate over tearing down the old buildings, the finished work shifts the conversation from what was lost to what a single, deliberate concrete gesture can do for a museum.

Project Team & Details