Zumthor's LACMA: The Museum That Floats
Twenty years is a long time to wait for a building. When Peter Zumthor’s David Geffen Galleries opened to the public on April 19, the inevitable question was whether the result could possibly justify the duration — the demolished buildings, the displaced collections, the cost overruns, the public debate that at various points turned genuinely hostile. The answer, like most things Zumthor designs, is both simpler and more complex than expected. Here is a building that does not look like the cultural argument it is, that hides its polemics under a coat of board-formed concrete and a tinted-glass eyebrow, and that has at last been built — not as the project the city debated, but as the project the architect drew. ...