If you’ve driven past or walked around LACMA lately, you might’ve noticed something different: a brand-new, 900-foot-long building.
After four years of construction, the museum recently announced that the last of the scaffolding had been removed around its glassy new David Geffen Galleries. The Peter Zumthor-designed campus—which now spans both sides of Wilshire Boulevard—will wrap major construction by the end of 2024, and after a yearlong transition process, it’ll welcome visitors into its galleries in April 2026.
But well before then, LACMA will offer “select groups” (which it notes includes members) an opportunity to preview the empty interior in the spring of 2025, before artwork installation begins. The Broad hosted a similar event nearly a decade ago, ahead of the Downtown L.A. museum’s debut, and if this is anything like that memorable sneak peek, you’ll probably want to be part of one of those “select groups.”
Whether or not you can call the new $750 million building an “expansion” has been an oddly contentious topic among L.A.’s art circles and media over the past few years. LACMA’s old eastern campus had consisted of five disparate, multi-level buildings bridged by a concrete courtyard. The Pavilion for Japanese Art is still standing and will reopen after a retrofit, but the four others have been replaced by a single, amoeba-shaped horizontal structure that will house all of the galleries on a single floor. The former multi-building setup featured 120,000 square feet of gallery space; the new single-building solution actually slightly lowers that to 110,000 square feet (about a decade ago, that number had once been touted as high as 170,000 square feet).
Regardless of the specific measurements, it’s perhaps more important what you’ll actually find inside of the David Geffen Galleries. In addition to space for artwork, the temple-like building will include a theater, education spaces, a museum shop, an event space and three restaurants and cafes, plus a number of back-of-house enhancements.
You might not have even noticed when the original buildings went away: Demolition began in the spring of 2020 when many Angelenos were spending most of their time at home due to the pandemic. And then there really wasn’t a whole lot to see for a few years. When I first returned to the campus in 2021, after museums were allowed to reopen for the first time in a year, all I found was construction fencing and a dirt pit. On subsequent visits, I could mostly just see layers of scaffolding, with with the top of the building visible by the fall of 2023.
During my most recent visit in September, though, that was the first time I was able to get a nearly-unobstructed view of parts of the new building; in particular, its eastern end pretty seamlessly blends in with the neighboring La Brea Tar Pits. As for the rest of it, we’ll have to wait and see until next year’s tease—and the eventual opening in 2026.