The Los Angeles County Museum of Art's new central building is a 'machine of discovery'

LOS ANGELES (AP) — It looks like a freeway on-ramp as it hovers over Wilshire Boulevard, but people behind the new building anchoring the Los Angeles County Museum of Art define it with aquatic imagery.

The free-flowing sections of the David Geffen Galleries housing the museum's permanent collection are named for the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, and they're meant to run together physically and culturally in the way bodies of water do.

Technically, the Geffen Galleries represent the third phase of a two-decade series of renovations. But the opening of this space to the public on May 4 is the truly huge moment of reinvention for the institution known to locals and the broader art world by the acronym LACMA.

It's a $724 million, 347,600 square-foot (32,293 square-meter) monument designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor that gives the museum an entirely new orientation, footprint, feeling and, ideally, an identity that it has largely lacked to the outside world.

The space — all on a single second-story floor — offers broad-windowed views of the surrounding city. There is no main entrance or central atrium. It's made to wander into, and through, and to encourage accidental interactions with paintings, sculptures and the kinds of work, like ancient pottery or textiles, that visitors often ignore.

LACMA's CEO and director Michael Govan, who oversaw the project from its origins, calls it “a machine of discovery.”

“I am a student for decades of museumgoer psychology,” Govan told The Associated Press in an interview inside the new building. “And one of the things you know in these museums is if you don’t like something or know something, you’re not going up an elevator and across to go see it. But a lot of times, that thing is what you will love if you see it.”

He added, “this chance of experiencing something accidentally and falling in love is part of the idea.”

The art is grouped as much for vibes as for any formal categories. Sculptures and photographs from modern artists are mixed in and matched with works that are centuries old.

The excess of natural light and views of the city that run throughout almost threaten to overshadow the art. But curtains — a staple of Zumthor’s architecture — are strategically used to alter light both for viewing and for preservation of work that can be drained by the sunlight.

Zumthor relishes the way the time of day, the placement of the curtains and the arrangement of the artwork work together in the space.

“Nothing is more beautiful to me than this play of shadow,” he told the AP.

Zumthor's previous work includes the Kolumba Museum in Cologne, Germany, run by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Cologne.

Since 1961, LACMA has sat on, and now across, Wilshire in the Miracle Mile section of Los Angeles, roughly halfway between downtown LA and the Pacific, next to the La Brea Tar Pits. (As with other projects on the site, the constant discovery of valuable fossils slowed work on the new building.)

For visitors who faithfully kept coming for its open-during-remodeling years, and for drivers navigating the construction, it felt like the opening would never come. Construction began in 2019, with the county footing $125 million of the bill. The rest was raised from private donors, including the 83-year-old entertainment mogul Geffen, who is one of LA’s biggest art benefactors.

Its 1988 Pavilion for Japanese Art is now LACMA's oldest section. The Broad Contemporary Art Museum (not to be confused with the stand-alone Broad downtown) was added in 2008, and the Resnick Exhibition Pavilion joined LACMA in 2010.

Other relatively recent additions have helped with LACMA's relevance. Two permanent sculpture-installations — Urban Light (artist Chris Burden's forest of street lamps) and Levitated Mass (artist Michael Heizer's giant suspended boulder) are among the city's most Instagrammed images.

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures next door is a separate entity but feels contiguous. Together, the two institutions represent the popular art that defines the region and its fine art that has often been ignored.