Twenty years of planning, six years of construction, a total project cost of USD 723.8 million. In the middle of Los Angeles a museum has climbed over a two-way boulevard. Set against the four buildings it tore down, though, the area it can exhibit in came out smaller.
1.On 19 April 2026 a ribbon was cut on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. General admission started on 4 May. The David Geffen Galleries, the new permanent building of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is a single slab 900 feet long, about 274m, and that slab rides straight over a two-way boulevard. The gallery floor hangs 30 feet, about 9m, above the ground. Peter Zumthor designed it.
2.Counting what came down goes first. In April 2020 the museum demolished the four oldest buildings on its campus. Three designed by William Pereira in 1965 and an annexe put up by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer in 1986. Buildings that had been the standard for late twentieth century cultural facilities in Los Angeles were gone in half a year, and the site sat empty for six while the new slab went up.
3.There is only one gallery floor. It is not divided into levels, and 110,000 square feet, about 3,091 pyeong, runs on without partitions. No route is set either, so visitors enter anywhere and leave anywhere. All four sides are glass from floor to ceiling, and inside that hangs a metal fibre curtain sputter-plated with chrome. The work of the textile designer Reiko Sudo.
4.Seven pavilions hold that slab up. The rest of the ground was left open, and 56 base isolators underneath let the building slide up to 5 feet, about 1.5m, in any direction. SOM did the structure. That is where USD 63 million of underground work went.
5.Step inside and the walls are pigmented concrete. Light comes through the curtain pressed down a layer, and under it things made of wood and stone, glass and clay wake up. Oil painting, by contrast, cannot beat coloured concrete, a verdict that arrived right after opening. This is not a house built for painting.
6.Lifting the slab 9m created 3.5 acres of shade underneath, about 4,285 pyeong. The seven pavilions took a shop, an education centre and a grab-and-go outlet, with a restaurant, a wine bar and a theatre opening in the second half of 2026. The rest of the shade is open to walk through. The area you need no ticket for is larger than the area you do.
7.Open up the money. Of the USD 723.8 million total, construction is 585 million. Above ground 485.5 million, below ground 63 million, site clearance 36.6 million. The remaining 138.7 million went to design and engineering, permits and project management. That is 19.2 percent of the total, a share rarely seen in Korean public procurement.
8.Put the dollar at KRW 1,380 and the total comes to about KRW 998.8 billion. Convert 347,500 square feet of floor area and it is 9,766 pyeong, so about KRW 102 million per pyeong. For a museum that is not a remarkable price. The next calculation is the problem. Divide by the 3,091 pyeong that actually holds work and it jumps to KRW 320 million per pyeong.
9.Funding runs three ways. The county put in USD 125 million and opened a USD 300 million credit line for use while fundraising ran behind. That 300 million is money the museum repays. Private fundraising passed its USD 750 million target and gathered more than 875 million, and separate from the building, USD 50 million went to permanent installations, artist commissions and acquisitions.
10.So where does this money come back from? General admission is USD 25 for adults, and this museum draws around a million visitors a year. Multiply and it is USD 25 million, about KRW 34.5 billion. County residents get in free from 3pm on weekdays, though, and the second Tuesday of every month is free, and anyone 17 and under is always free. Actual admission revenue per head has to land well under 25 dollars. That is an estimate, and the direction is clear.
11.What this building actually sold is not exhibition area but ground. Shade is an asset in Los Angeles, and the boulevard frontage in front of the museum took sun all day. The decision to lift one slab 9m carries with it the handover of 4,285 pyeong at grade to the city. Miss that arithmetic, where close to half the project cost went into area that sells no tickets, and the building looks like nothing but an expensive bridge.
12.The way work is hung follows the same logic. Nothing is arranged by region or by date. Objects are grouped along the routes they travelled, on four axes: the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. More than 80 groupings drawn from 6,000 years of holdings, 2,500 to 3,000 pieces at a time. With no rooms by civilisation, there is no gallery for any one country.
13.The turn is in the area table. The new building has 11,000 square feet, about 309 pyeong, less exhibition area than the four demolished buildings had together. Close to a trillion won went in and the space for hanging work shrank, and the criticism started before opening. Christopher Knight, formerly the Los Angeles Times art critic, called the building monotonous, and the architecture critic Joseph Giovannini took issue with the selection of the architect and the way the budget was disclosed. His point was that drawings and budgets came late for a project the public half paid for.
14.The money kept coming, though. The opening gala raised USD 11.5 million in a day, the highest in the museum's fundraising history. While critics fought over an area table, donors bought something else. One shape that stands out in the city, the right to put a name on it, and the sight of a block that had been a construction site for six years filling with people again.
15.Twenty years of preparation and six of building produced a museum of about KRW 998.8 billion, and the area for hanging work fell by about 309 pyeong, while 4,285 pyeong of shade that sells no tickets appeared in the city. What stops anyone moving this to Korea at the first meeting is not the form but the name for that free area. In public cultural projects, public space at grade is hard to put in the box that explains the benefit, and budget review asks first about cost per unit of floor area and paying visitor numbers. A design that gives ground back to the city makes both of those worse at once. So what the planners of a building like this need to prepare is not a rendering but an argument that defends the value of the emptied area in review.
