Stretched across a boulevard and shaped like an ‘amoeba’, the divisive Geffen Galleries open next week
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wo decades ago, the new director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) began a project to revitalize the space for the 21st century. On Wednesday, the institution unveiled the results of that $724m effort: the David Geffen Galleries, a hulking, curving concrete building that spans Wilshire Boulevard.
In a city of striking modern architecture, from the Getty Museum to the Disney Concert Hall, the opening is a landmark event. The project, whose unconventional shape has been likened to an amoeba, has inspired praise and polarization.
The 110,000 sq feet of galleries are housed in an imposing, elevated gray structure, ringed with enormous windows, that would be at home in an episode of The Jetsons. Speaking to the press on Wednesday, the museum’s director, Michael Govan, hailed the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor’s work as “of the future and past at the same time”, a building that is “accessible and sublime and new and different”.
