David Geffen Galleries at LACMA
Los Angeles • Museum
Designed by Pritzker Prize laureate Peter Zumthor in collaboration with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the David Geffen Galleries are a $724M concrete-and-glass single-floor building that curves along Hancock Park and spans Wilshire Boulevard on LACMA's 20-acre Miracle Mile campus — the culmination of a more than two-decade transformation. The free-flowing main floor is elevated nearly 30 feet above street level on seven semi-transparent pavilions that hold a theater, retail, dining, education facilities and outdoor programming around the W.M. Keck Foundation Plaza. The horizontal, single-level layout deliberately collapses traditional museum hierarchies, placing all works on the same plane with naturally lit perimeter galleries and fully enclosed interior rooms. Major construction wrapped at the end of 2024; portions of the lower levels began opening to the public in summer 2025; LACMA expands its gallery space from ~130,000 to 220,000 sq ft. Targets LEED Gold; over 95% construction-and-demolition waste diverted; grand public opening April 19, 2026.
