A Horizontal Monument Above Wilshire Boulevard

The new museum expansion in Los Angeles spans Wilshire Boulevard to create a massive, elevated landscape for art. This horizontal structure rejects traditional gallery corridors in favor of a vast, open-ended visitor sequence. The design bridges the gap between urban infrastructure and the monumental scale of desert land art.

The project draws direct inspiration from monumental desert earthworks, prioritizing horizontality and immense open spaces. The design features two enormous concrete plates—a floor and a ceiling—suspended thirty feet above the ground. Each plate extends approximately 900 feet, roughly the size of six football fields. Together, these elements form a massive building that functions more like topography than a traditional house for art.

The team positioned the structure to float above the street, directly challenging the usual dominance of cars in the city. By lifting the galleries, the intervention creates a new public realm underneath the belly of the building. This approach mimics the spatial logic of a highway interchange, yet it serves pedestrians and museum visitors rather than vehicle traffic.

Michael Heizer's monumental land art project titled 'City' in Nevada. Image © Michael Heizer (Ben Blackwell/Courtesy the artist and Triple Aught Foundation)

Inside the expansion, the institution displays art in no obvious order and with minimal signage. The design encourages visitors to move through the space extemporaneously and form their own subjective connections between works. A continuous glass wall wraps the entire perimeter, offering panoramic views that integrate the interior experience with the surrounding urban planning.

Translating Scale and Materiality

The primary materials include light gray concrete and flat glass panels. The concrete surfaces show streaks, stains, and natural discolorations, which the design team views as a characteristic of the local industrial aesthetic. This raw finish reinforces the project's connection to the "bulldozer art" of the mid-20th century, where artists used heavy machinery to shape the earth into permanent monuments.

Interior circulation route within the David Geffen Galleries, featuring a continuous glass facade and sheer curtains. Image © Museum Associates/LACMA

The project underwent significant changes during its long development period. The team originally proposed a more fluid, amoebic shape with dark concrete to reference nearby natural tar pits. However, technical requirements and budget management eventually flattened these organic curves. The final version utilizes straighter lines and flat glass panes, meeting beneath a curving canopy in a more pragmatic structural arrangement.

Structural Adaptations and Spatial Sequence

To support the massive weight of the concrete plates across the boulevard, the design uses heavy-duty supports that integrate essential services. These vertical cores house fire stairs and bathrooms while acting as the primary structural pillars. Despite these functional necessities, the interior maintains a sense of unbounded landscape, where the ceiling height and floor area suggest an outdoor scale.

Street-level view of the David Geffen Galleries building at LACMA facing Wilshire Boulevard. Image © Iwan Baan

The museum leadership notes that while the project serves as a pilgrimage site for art lovers, the building itself remains the primary attraction. The design team sought to capture the meditative power of remote desert installations within a dense metropolitan context. Even with the constraints of building codes and liability insurance, the structure achieves a level of gigantism rarely seen in modern museum architecture.

Infrastructure as Topography: The Logic of Horizontal Vastness

The project operates through a strategy of radical horizontality, treating the museum as an infrastructural extension of the city. By spanning a major road, the design replaces the traditional vertical museum stack with a continuous, elevated plane. This spatial logic prioritizes an open-ended visitor sequence over a prescribed narrative path. The heavy use of concrete and the glass envelope create a shell that feels both permanent and porous. This approach successfully captures the scale of land art, but the transition to an urban site introduces a tension between pure form and functional necessity. The resulting structure sits somewhere between a refined gallery and a massive piece of public infrastructure, redefining the museum's role in the urban fabric.

✦ ArchUp Editorial Insight

The project attempts to translate the radical autonomy of desert land art into a dense urban environment. By elevating two massive concrete plates above a public thoroughfare, the design creates a new type of architectural architecture that functions more like topography than a building. This strategy replaces traditional museum hierarchies with an open, non-linear visitor sequence that mirrors the experience of navigating a vast landscape. However, the transition from the remote desert to a regulated city environment reveals an inherent tension. Strict building codes, financial constraints, and construction realities eventually flattened the project's original fluid geometries. While the desert allows for absolute material perfection, the urban version must settle for industrial compromises. This result suggests that the raw power of land art inevitably diminishes when forced to serve public functions and safety standards.

Project Team: Peter Zumthor, SOM, Triple Aught Foundation. Location: Los Angeles, CA.

Project Notes: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) serves as the client. The David Geffen Galleries opened in April 2026 following a $730 million fundraising campaign led by the museum director.

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