There are buildings that announce themselves immediately, and there are buildings that reveal themselves slowly, the way dusk enters a room. Peter Zumthor has spent a lifetime pursuing the second path. Across his career, the Swiss architect has shaped spaces that feel remembered as much as seen, places that settle into the senses before they resolve into form.
Now, after nearly twenty years of imagining, dismantling, revising, engineering, and waiting, Zumthor’s long-anticipated David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) have emerged over Los Angeles like a vast concrete horizon.
The structure hovers above Wilshire Boulevard with an uncanny calm. It curves through the city in pale concrete arcs, immense in scale yet strangely weightless, as though it had drifted there overnight on coastal fog. Beneath it, shade gathers in cool pools. Cars pass underneath. Wind moves through open civic space. Visitors wander below the galleries before ascending into rooms filled with changing daylight and distant views of palm trees trembling against the sky. It behaves like weather.
“I don’t like starting with a building type,” Zumthor said recently during a public conversation at LACMA. “I like starting with a site, with what people want.”
Architecture as Atmosphere
Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Sculpture Garden with Auguste Rodin’s “Monumental Head of Pierre de Wissant” (1884–85) in foreground, David Geffen Galleries at LACMA, photo © Iwan Baan, courtesy of LACMA.
Installation view of the inaugural presentation in the David Geffen Galleries, April 2026, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA, courtesy of LACMA.
That instinct has guided him from the beginning. Born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1943, Zumthor first trained as a cabinetmaker under the careful eye of his father, Oscar Zumthor. Before architecture became theory, it was touch: wood grain beneath the hand, the smell of sawdust, the patience of craft. Later, after studying at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel and Pratt Institute in New York, he worked in the preservation of historic monuments in Graubünden, studying ancient villages and vernacular structures with near-devotional attentiveness. Those early years shaped his understanding of architecture as atmosphere. Buildings, for Zumthor, carry temperature, silence, shadow, ritual.
That philosophy would later define projects such as Therme Vals, the Kolumba Museum, and Kunsthaus Bregenz—works that earned him the 2009 Pritzker Architecture Prize and established him among the defining architects of his generation. Even amid global acclaim, Zumthor continued working from his intimate studio in Haldenstein with extraordinary slowness and precision. The David Geffen Galleries became one of his most ambitious undertakings: a museum conceived as something grown from the light and movement of Los Angeles itself.
The project evolved continuously over two decades alongside LACMA CEO and director Michael Govan. Entire models were destroyed and rebuilt. Curves shifted. The building adapted itself in response to neighboring architecture, traffic patterns, public concerns, seismic realities, and the sprawling horizontality of Los Angeles. At one point, the museum learned to cross Wilshire Boulevard.
Peter Zumthor Building for the City
Exterior view northwest from Wilshire Boulevard with Tony Smith’s “Smoke” (1967) at left, David Geffen Galleries at LACMA, art © Tony Smith Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo © Iwan Baan, courtesy of LACMA.
Originally conceived as a broad elevated structure resting entirely on one side of the street, the design transformed when adjacent institutional needs reshaped the site plan. Rather than retreat, Peter Zumthor allowed the building to stretch outward over the boulevard itself, creating one of the boldest gestures in contemporary American museum architecture. Now the galleries float above the city, supported by a network of sculptural concrete forms engineered to withstand major seismic movement. The structure can shift dramatically during an earthquake while remaining intact, a colossal organism moving as one body.
Yet what lingers most is feeling. The underside of the museum breathes like a public grove. Shade becomes civic infrastructure. Beneath the galleries are gathering spaces, pathways, landscaped areas, and open zones intended for films, performances, dinners, and public conversation. In Los Angeles, where heat and sunlight shape daily life with near-mythic intensity, the creation of shade feels quite tender. The landscape folds naturally into the architecture. Olive trees, drought-tolerant plantings, and native vegetation soften the concrete edges. The museum campus drifts directly into the city around it.
Upstairs, the galleries resist rigid direction. Visitors are released into a wandering sequence of rooms and courtyards where ancient sculpture, contemporary painting, textiles, ceremonial objects, photography, and design encounter one another across centuries and continents. The inaugural installation privileges resonance over taxonomy. Connections emerge emotionally before intellectually. A sculpture from antiquity suddenly echoes the gesture of a contemporary work nearby. Ceramics appear illuminated by the same sun that once touched them centuries ago.
“You move in and out of life,” Zumthor reflected.
Light, Shadow, and Material
Photo by Iwan Baan. Courtesy of LACMA.
Light becomes the true curator of the building. Unlike traditional museums built around skylights and top illumination, Peter Zumthor insisted on side light from the beginning. Daylight enters laterally, drifting across floors and walls before dissolving into shadow. Galleries brighten and darken gradually, creating moments of intimacy, concealment, and sudden release.
“Shadow is the evidence of the sun,” he said.
That sentence seems to explain the entire museum. The architecture allows visitors to feel time passing. Morning light is not afternoon light. Winter is not summer. The museum changes with weather, cloud cover, sunset, atmosphere. Windows frame fragments of Los Angeles everywhere—the Hollywood Hills, palms, moving traffic, the glowing haze of the city itself.
Inside, the walls possess an almost volcanic depth. After years of experimentation, Zumthor rejected conventional painted surfaces in favor of heavily pigmented finishes inspired partly by mineral-rich Mesoamerican materials. The resulting galleries feel hushed and tactile, their surfaces absorbing light while objects emerge slowly from darkness, like memories surfacing underwater. Nothing feels sterile. Nothing feels digitally perfected.
The Human Hand
Photo by Iwan Baan. Courtesy of LACMA.
Peter Zumthor has long resisted the contemporary obsession with flawlessness. During construction, when workers worried over imperfections in the exposed concrete, he refused correction. “You are working on a sculpture of concrete,” he told them. “Sculptures are never perfect.”
That philosophy remains embedded throughout the building. Tens of thousands of hands shaped the museum. Their labor is visible in the grain of surfaces, in slight irregularities, in textures left uncovered rather than erased. The concrete carries traces of making. The building remembers the people who built it. The David Geffen Galleries insist upon material honesty and human presence.
And for all its monumentality, the building remains intimate. Zumthor has often spoken about childhood memories as the origin of his architecture—opening the gate to his aunt’s garden, entering her kitchen, sensing warmth, smell, quiet, enclosure. Those moments taught him that architecture is experienced first through the body before it is understood by the mind.
That wisdom now drifts through the heart of Los Angeles.
A Living Landscape
Photo by Iwan Baan. Courtesy of LACMA.
Later this year, the campus will continue evolving with the opening of LACMA’s new theater, extending Zumthor’s vision of the museum as a civic landscape for gathering and exchange. Upcoming exhibitions, performances, and commissions will activate the galleries in new ways, allowing the architecture itself to keep changing with use, movement, and time.
Perhaps the deepest achievement of the David Geffen Galleries is the way they invite attentiveness. The building slows perception. It encourages visitors to notice shadow softening across concrete, or wind moving through olive trees beneath the structure. In a city defined by movement and reinvention, Peter Zumthor has created a place where people may wander long enough to feel fully present inside their own lives.
