Los Angeles. The endlessly sunny but increasingly hard-pressed home of Hollywood and health-food fads — still singed by last year’s wildfires and ICE raids, but also on a fresh high from hosting the 2026 FIFA World Cup and now gearing up to welcome the 2027 Super Bowl and the 2028 Olympics in rapid succession — has a new claim to fame: It is in the midst of a major museum renaissance.

This spring, LACMA opened the David Geffen Galleries, a raised concrete deck for viewing both art and the city, designed by Peter Zumthor with SOM. If you take the subway to see it (an admittedly radical idea in L.A.), you will arrive via the city’s new D Line, which functions as its own kind of urban gallery. And this fall sees the unveiling of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art (shown above), MAD and Stantec’s space station–sized showcase of George Lucas and Mellody Hobson’s out-of-this-world collection.

All three of these projects take exciting approaches to the display of art: LACMA by collapsing space and time with thematic rather than chronological groupings and a winding, choose-your-own-adventure layout; the Lucas Museum by mixing Frida Kahlo with C-3PO; and the D Line by integrating works directly into a significant evolution of the city’s car-centric transportation network. The stories that these projects tell — about both their own construction and the world around them — are nothing short of monumental. Consider 2026 the year of the latest sequel to the Guggenheim effect. And it’s worth getting tickets to.

1

The David Geffen Galleries at LACMA

When I landed in L.A. in mid-July, The Odyssey was on every theatre’s marquee. I had seen the summer blockbuster — a 3,000-year-old poem once recited by bards around campfires, now reimagined as an IMAX-sized, Matt Damon–led spectacle — a few nights earlier, and I was still processing the sheer scale of it when I arrived at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). In a way, I ended up encountering another version of the same story. As with Christopher Nolan’s film, LACMA’s profound 32,284-square-metre David Geffen Galleries represent a retelling of ancient art, staged with a little Hollywood magic and brought to life by fierce ambition.

First off, the building has undeniable star power. It takes its name from entertainment tycoon David Geffen, whose superyacht is many A-listers’ vacation spot of choice, and who donated a fifth of the project’s US$724 million budget. Its café (which overlooks a pond filled with Alexander Calder mobiles) is run by Erewhon, the local grocery store chain where Hailey Bieber likes to buy fancy smoothies. Tom Hanks and Eva Longoria attended the April opening, while Dior staged a May fashion show there; Miley Cyrus and Sabrina Carpenter sat front row. And then there is the principal designer of the new landmark: Pritzker Prize–winning Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, creator of mythically minimalist European spas, chapels and museums. 

Somehow, that last name eclipses all the others the minute you step inside. In person, the David Geffen Galleries’ biggest surprise is how primordial they can feel. In place of the white walls you typically find inside a museum are raw, richly textured concrete surfaces that fundamentally shift how you interpret the works on and around them — stripping away art-world loftiness until even Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud (one of LACMA’s recent acquisitions) feels closer to a cave painting than a US$142-million grail. “Sheetrock, which we build our white gallery spaces out of, is a 20th-century invention, and I always think that ancient art looks ill on it,” says LACMA director Michael Govan, who steered this project over the past two decades. “Concrete has been used for millennia, so it can be an appropriate frame for such a wide range of art. And it’s the perfect colour, because grey allows for lights to be bright and darks to be dark.”

For as elemental as they are, the David Geffen Galleries do not try to obscure their glossy Tinseltown surroundings, either. Propped up by 10 blocky cores, with seven glassed-in, ground-level auxiliary spaces threaded between them — including a gift shop, an education centre and the aforementioned café — the building’s elevated (and in many areas, dramatically cantilevered) 10,219-square-metre gallery level passes right over Wilshire Boulevard like a bridge, leveraging the air rights between two disconnected plots of land. A supersized windshield wraps the entire serpentine perimeter, placing a cinematic frame around this roadway, but also around LACMA’s impressive collection of outdoor sculptures (which includes Chris Burden’s cluster of 202 historic street lamps) and neighbouring institutions like the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. With little signage inside, the building encourages you to use these outdoor landmarks as wayfinding aids. 

In turn, you are constantly torn between feeling like you are wandering through some ancient civilization’s catacombs and looking out toward palm trees and billboards plastered with iPhone ads and “For Your Consideration” Emmy campaigns. Rather than causing whiplash, this dynamic is part of the building’s magic. It is a perfect place to reflect on what distinguishes the art that we keep returning to — a 400 BCE Greek vessel, a 16th-century Belgian reliquary bust or a 17th-century Dutch still life — and how a museum environment can do justice to that timelessness.

When Govan stepped into the top role at LACMA back in 2006, fresh from the Dia Art Foundation, he arrived to a trio of leaky William Pereira–designed facilities from 1965 that were “kind of made out of cardboard” and a Rem Koolhaas reno concept that had won a 2001 design competition but alienated donors. Govan resolved to shepherd something new that was both showy and saleable. A hyper-vertical building by Renzo Piano that opened in 2008 and a hyper-horizontal follow-up in 2010 served as first steps in the museum’s evolution, introducing homes for contemporary art and temporary exhibitions. But Govan had another Pritzker winner in mind for the permanent collection: Zumthor, with whom he had previously been in conversation about a never-realized project at Dia. He rounded out his LACMA designer dream team with a dose of pragmatism. “Everybody said to me, ‘Are you crazy? You’re going to pair the mountain man with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill?’ ” he recounts. “But they didn’t understand — Zumthor appreciates skill, all types of skill. And with SOM, I knew I had an executive architect that could really make this work in America at a civic scale.”

Zumthor’s arresting concept — originally an all-black suspended concrete glob inspired in part by the museum’s neighbouring La Brea Tar Pits that later dropped its dark colour scheme — elicited as much awe as skepticism; Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight won a Pulitzer for his series of takedowns. Some of the backlash came from the fact that Pereira’s buildings were demolished without a proper design competition, but Govan feels the competition process can be misleading: “Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall competition entry doesn’t look anything like that building,” he says. He also resists the idea that he alone pushed Zumthor’s design through, especially given that it had to secure the approval of LACMA’s board, as well as convince donors like Geffen and Ryan Seacrest to front 80 per cent of the budget (public funds covered the other 20). “I devoted a lot of my personal effort to this direction, but it still went through a lot of evaluation,” he says. Later on, others bemoaned the project’s value engineering when some of the original design’s curved glass corners were built with right angles instead. Criticism about the high carbon footprint that accompanies the building’s wholehearted embrace of concrete is the hardest to reconcile; indeed, this is the big trade off of its colossal poetry.

Making that concrete twist and turn was no easy feat, either — with light fixtures, electrical outlets and card readers all embedded directly in the structure, everything had to be coordinated before the pour. The size of the formwork was another saga, as Zumthor was accustomed to European production capabilities. “Were we going to go through the gymnastics to import 25-foot formwork from Finland? In the end, we did it the American way. We can live with four-by-eight-foot sheets,” says Carol Ann Ruiz, a senior associate principal at SOM. “We were there to support Zumthor’s vision, and I was this ambassador to Switzerland, to really embed with his team and help them understand what it is to build in L.A.,” she says. In particular, she adds, the prevalence of ADA rules and seismic earthquakes were new elements for Studio Zumthor to think about. “This is a concrete building that needs to move,” she notes. Hence the 56 seismic base isolators below the ground and its post-tensioned structural system. Zumthor pushed SOM in new directions, too, stressing the need for delicate, 10-centimetre reveals between many of the interior walls and the ceiling and prompting an extended scavenger hunt to find a fabricator that could produce his giant steel doors.

While acknowledging that SOM is “very polar opposite” of Zumthor, Ruiz notes the opportunity to work with him was “a dream.” “There have been ups and downs, as with any relationship,” she says. “But we still talk to each other. With all these master architects, you learn from them as much as you can and then see how it fits into your own views of architecture. In this case, he changed how I think about material honesty. Don’t cover things up if you don’t need to cover them up. Steel is steel, concrete is concrete.”

These two materials, along with glass, define the entirety of the building’s winding, columnless floor plan, largely dedicated to wide-open circulation-meets-exhibition space but also encompassing 27 modest rooms that house light-sensitive works. (Out in the main hall, a few pieces presented behind glass, like Bacon’s triptych, do suffer from glare at certain times of day.) Along with more controlled lighting, many of the inner sancta feature one embellishment: concrete tinted with mineral-based paint, developed by Swiss colourist Marius Fontana and Germany’s Keim. In one such red chamber, the background of Georges de La Tour’s circa 1635–37 portrait of Mary Magdalene seems to bleed out into its surroundings.

Twenty-three of the inner galleries have just a single entrance (some a mere 2.1 metres high), but there are otherwise no dead ends in the building, and no clear route to follow. “You are free to roam and wander and take different paths,” Govan says. “And you should try different paths, because then you’ll come to something from a different perspective.” Displays are similarly free-flowing, grouping works from varying eras and geographic areas into themes (like cowboy culture or “Boundaries and Belonging”) and keeping them all on one level so that no one chapter of time or corner of the world takes precedence. Govan explains that this everything-everywhere-all-at-once strategy plays to the strengths of LACMA’s encyclopedic collection, which spans a 6,000-year range with no deep specialty or focus. The museum team will re-hang the collection frequently, placing works into different pairings with both each other and the structure around them. “What I knew I needed was emotional architecture,” Govan says. “In a digital age when people have access to all information and images, what they’ll value is the sensory combination of the built environment and the materiality of art.”

When he tours people through the building, he tends to start right in the centre. “I had this idea for these four big Andreas Gursky photographs in the middle because they’re oceans. The entire curatorial program for this iteration is built around those — the Pacific, Indian, Mediterranean, and Atlantic as muses,” he says. “It’s about migration and interconnectivity, and it’s the opposite of a 19th-century sensibility, where we’d separate everything out into pure categories. What we’re interested in today is the idea that we’re all intermixed. Look at Los Angeles — how did we become who we are? How do we get these great cities filled with so many diasporas? And so, the building answers — and it asks different questions.”

*ART ON THE WALLS*

Three LACMA works that look right at home in their new setting.

1. The fractal ceramic tiles that make up Henri Matisse’s La Gerbe are echoed by the triangular concrete ceiling panels above them (which themselves mirror the waffle slab in the roof band). 

2. Uta Barth’s photographic triptych of a hand brushing against cloth picks up where flame-retardant sputter-plated chrome curtains by Reiko Sudō (which filter light in particularly sun-soaked areas of the building) leave off.

3. The expressive brushstrokes of Granville Redmond’s oil painting California Poppy Field mirror the texture of the concrete wall it hangs on, formed with MDO plywood.

2

The Lucas Museum

If there’s a place that can match the David Geffen Galleries’ tour-de-force scale, it’s the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, a brand new L.A. cultural institution that seems beamed in from another galaxy entirely, spearheaded by Star Wars creator George Lucas alongside his wife, businesswoman Mellody Hobson. Lucas’s fanbase will no doubt flock to it, but the building’s curatorial strategy also called to mind another film I had seen this summer: Disclosure Day, by Lucas’s pal Steven Spielberg. That movie culminates in (spoiler!) a fractured society uniting to watch a news broadcast reveal that there are aliens among us — and the government has been mistreating them.

Are there aliens among us? Ask the current U.S. administration, and the answer is a definitive yes. The webpage aliens.govwent live in May, using language that evokes extraterrestrials — “They’ve lived seemingly normal human existences” — to describe undocumented immigrants. To really drive the dumb joke home, the manifesto (which ends with a tip line for reporting alien “encounters”) is rendered to look like the opening credits of The X Files. The federal agency dedicated to monitoring these so-called threats, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), was met with particularly strong resistance during summer 2025 in Los Angeles, a county where as much as 10 per cent of the population is undocumented. After starting in L.A., anti-ICE protests eventually spread across the U.S. Biking to Villa’s Tacos in the city’s Grand Central Market the following summer, I pedalled past a large sign in a corner store window that read “IMMIGRANTS MAKE AMERICA GREAT.” Los Angeles, a place where you can take the Universal Studios Hollywood Backlot Tour around immortalized sets from sci-fi films War of the Worlds and Nope, is well-trained at recognizing extraterrestrials. And its community members are no aliens.

Now, the Lucas Museum is here to get people reacquainted with aliens of the actual outer-space variety — and Vincent van Gogh while they’re at it. Estimated to have cost as much as US$1.5 billion, the project leverages at least a quarter of the fortune that its namesake made by selling Star Wars to Disney back in 2012 and displays his and Hobson’s personal collection of both art and sci-fi ephemera. (Hobson, a co-owner of the Ariel Investments equity asset management firm, has her own sizeable wealth.) When I viewed the eight-years-in-the-making building (in terms of construction, at least; plans for a then–San Francisco–based institution date back to 2014) in July ahead of its official September 22 opening, it was only from outside. But from my not-so-far-far-away vantage point, the 27,870-square-metre behemoth was staggering. It is located across the road from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which in 2028 will become the first venue to have hosted three Olympics, yet it still pulls all focus in its direction.

The building’s amorphous, five-storey amalgamation of stacked, curvilinear planes was dreamed up by MAD, the Beijing-based architecture studio (with an L.A. office) led by Ma Yansong, who specializes in audacious organic forms. It comes hot on the heels of the firm’s previous cultural triumph, 2025’s Fenix Museum of Migration in Rotterdam, where MAD perched a silver spiral staircase in the sky to represent the migrant experience. The Lucas Museum makes that gesture look like child’s play. Here, we see an architectural Jedi master at the full height of his power. And yet, thanks to the abundant trees, shrubs and other landscaping growing on top of it — all courtesy of Studio-MLA’s Mia Lehrer — this new marvel already has strong roots, too. As much as it may resemble a spaceship or intergalactic whale, it’s one that seems to have landed quite some time ago and since become one with Earth. Fear not: the Lucas Museum comes in peace. Sure enough, the building’s sustainability bona fides include geothermal and rainwater harvesting systems, plus photovoltaics that, like the facade’s fibreglass-reinforced polymer panels, resemble pseudo-reptilian scales.

Just as unconventional as the museum’s design (which, along with MAD, also involved Stantec as the project’s executive architect) is its collection and approach to curation. “George was very interested in this institution elevating unsung artists who make what he calls ‘the people’s art’ — comics, children’s book illustrations, fantasy and advertisements. And he wanted a building that would convey that significance,” explains Hillary Bliss, the Lucas Museum’s chief of staff, who previously worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Lucas Museum’s collection includes a Frida Kahlo self-portrait and a Diego Rivera painting, but also C-3PO concept art and pages from Flash Gordon comic books. “I’ve heard comic collectors talk about how it is finally putting what they care about at this museum level,” says Bliss. At the same time, she recognizes that it may serve as some science-fiction fans’ first introduction to fine art, too. “Come for Star Wars and stay for Norman Rockwell,” she encourages. Ultimately, she feels the museum’s strength will be the thematic bridges it builds between worlds. “Throughout all cultures and periods, we’ve created images about heroes and told stories about motherhood,” she notes, referencing two key displays that, like the David Geffen Galleries, will unite works from a wide variety of sources. In other words, maybe we all have more in common than we realize. (Hopefully, that’s a lesson that the more toxic fringes of the Star Wars fandom take to heart.)

After both the museum’s inaugural director and its chief curator stepped down in 2025, Lucas himself assumed the post of content director. His flair for the cinematic seems to have touched every detail of the museum experience. Futuristic set pieces will include pod-like glass tube elevators, space station–esque exhibition halls and two state-of-the-art theatres. With any luck, the interiors will strike a happy medium between a theme park and a gallery — again, pleasing Star Wars fans and art scholars in equal measure. Critically, the complex is civic-minded, too: Passersby can use its central plaza (crowned by a giant rooftop oculus) to move between two halves of the surrounding South L.A. neighbourhood that were formerly cut off by (what else?) a giant parking lot, while a community library will serve the public and the 100-odd schools within a 16-kilometre radius; museum admission will also be free to anyone in its zip code. In an otherworldly shell, the building will be a tribute to humanity and community-building.

3

The D Line

Speaking of parking lots, L.A. has a more robust transit system than I had been led to believe, but it’s often still no match for the city’s sprawl. Places like Silver Lake’s suave, wood-panelled Bar di Bello (by local firm 22RE) were a maze of bus transfers away from my points of origin. On the other hand, many of the city’s museums — the Broad, LACMA, the Academy Museum and even the Petersen Automotive Museum — were all, miraculously, located right next to subway stations. In the case of the latter three, that’s a brand new development thanks to the D Line that is being built as part of the city’s “Twenty-eight by ’28” batch of pre-Olympics infrastructure projects. (Meanwhile, LAX is still readying SkyLink, a tram that will establish easier movement between the airport, its parking and rental lots and the LA Metro. Said to be “99.6 per cent” complete, it is more than US$1 billion over budget and three years overdue.)

But back to a transit success story. Three new D Line stations opened this spring, including Wilshire/Fairfax, which drops you right into Beverly Hills’ Museum Row; four more are on the way next year, followed by another that will eventually extend the line to Westwood. Appropriately, each one is its own mini-gallery. At Wilshire/Fairfax, local artist Karl Haendel created a mix of photos and pencil drawings that depict hands — modelled after the actual palms of people who work in the area — holding everyday artifacts that are again sourced from different eras and points of origin. Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel “Amerika,” which detailed stories of his relatives’ immigration, is raised up above the escalator descent into the station, otherwise a clean-lined collection of glass, steel and concrete (by Johnson Fain, Gensler and Stantec). At the current terminus station, Wilshire/La Cienega, a mural by Soo Kim, Night / Quartz, looks like a cross between a city planning map and a circuit board — teasing the new line’s promise of connection.

Still, an Uber was essentially the only way to get from Griffith Park to the Getty, and for most other travel, I cycled between three different bikeshare services (several operate in some areas but not others), constantly snapping photos on my phone along the way to prove to an algorithm that I’d responsibly parked my Lime ebike in Beverly Hills and Bird rental in Venice Beach (both can be ditched anywhere, rather than just in designated docking stations like the Metro bikes I rode downtown). Add in the driverless Waymo cars zipping past me on the road and the A.I.- or remote-powered food delivery robots trucking next to me on the sidewalk and it was easy to feel like people come second to vehicles in this city. Then again, that’s L.A.’s brand.

In keeping with this proudly auto-centric culture, LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries hold an impressive collection of car memorabilia, from highway images by Denise Scott Brown and Dennis Hopper to a 1961 Studebaker Avanti. But as with the generously landscaped Lucas Museum, the building also picks up where the city’s urban realm leaves off. That’s true inside — envisioned, as Govan says, as “a park where you can just wander” — as well as outside, where the plaza below and around the structure offers another pedestrian respite, one engraved with designs by Mexican artist Mariana Castillo Deball. “I’m always looking for public outdoor space, and L.A. doesn’t have a lot of it,” says SOM’s Ruiz, who moved to the city from New York while working on the LACMA project. “Now, even if the museum is closed, you can come to this communal space and walk your dog in the morning — and you don’t need a ticket for the public realm.” 

In June, LACMA shut down part of Wilshire Boulevard to hold the first edition of the Los Angeles Art Parade, which saw participants march in costumes or carry balloon floats or mobile sculptures — several of them, like a papier-mâché recreation of Michael Heizer’s 308-tonne Levitated Mass boulder artwork, inspired by the museum’s collection. Local artist Nick Rodrigues walked the street crucified on a car sculpture. But the 60,000 people who attended the parade and LACMA’s subsequent block party (which featured DJ sets and dancing in the museum’s courtyard) also demonstrated the power of a good pedestrian plaza. As L.A.’s urban realm evolves, art is playing a leading role.

•••

Most people recognize the names Lucas, Spielberg and Nolan (plus increasingly, those of Greta Gerwig and Ryan Coogler, from a new, more diverse generation of blockbuster directors), but architects rarely acquire that level of cultural familiarity. During the starchitect era, designers like Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid became exceptions by envisioning radical museums that put under-the-radar cities on the map. Now, Ma Yansong and Peter Zumthor (and the robust, talented teams that supported them) have introduced two significant institutional landmarks in a place that, unlike the Bilbao or Cincinnati of three decades ago, is already a well-established cultural destination. (If anything, L.A.’s version of the Guggenheim effect started many years ago, as the Getty, Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall and, later, the Broad evolved public perception of the city’s arts scene and, in the case of the latter two, the city’s downtown in particular.) Rather than redefining their setting, the David Geffen Galleries and the Lucas Museum instead reinforce what Los Angeles has always been: a place of incredible storytelling.

What makes the two projects true blockbusters is not just their bigness but the strength of the narratives they present. The Lucas Museum tells a story about belonging — introducing a collection of art dedicated to museum outsiders and delivering a reminder that we are all, in some ways, misfits from a strange planet. Meanwhile, the David Geffen Galleries are a sprawling investigation of the way that artworks endure and acquire new meaning over time. What’s more, by positioning both designs adjacent to Hollywood, Yansong and Zumthor have successfully reaffirmed architecture’s place in popular culture. (The Lucas Museum made the cover of Vogue, while a Wim Wenders–directed Zumthor documentary plays at the Venice Film Festival this fall.) Neither designer may go on to gain a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame — and anyway, Zumthor is probably happy enough with his Pritzker. But there is already merit to reigniting mass interest in the built environment. Bringing back the era of must-see-architecture-as-entertainment is no small feat — especially when the plot is this captivating. 

*PACIFIC LIPOSCULPTURE*

In true L.A. fashion, two of the city’s other cultural institutions are preparing for the 2028 Olympics spotlight by getting a little work done.

1. The Broad is receiving the architectural equivalent of a Brazilian butt lift: a new addition in the form of a suspended 4,645-square-metre rear block (by original architects Diller Scofidio + ​Renfro) that flips the initial structure’s dynamic, making its white honeycomb “veil” an accent and concrete the main material.

2. The Getty’s largely imperceptible procedures will keep Richard Meier’s 29-year-old campus forever young by modernizing HVAC and bolstering performance. The most noticeable updates: A revamped tram line (which visitors ride up from the parking lot) featuring sculptural canopies by Gehry Partners, plus new amenity spaces by WHY Architecture and refreshed landscaping by OLIN.