The Epic of the Museum That Crossed the Street: LACMA's David Geffen Galleries

In Los Angeles, a city that created more images than memories, the David Geffen Galleries of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, designed by Peter Zumthor, stretch across the city and cross Wilshire Boulevard, and the book asks whether a museum must be a box that contains art. Zumthor refuses the box: a low, horizontal concrete body with no conventional front façade or royal axis invites discovery, and its great length turns walking itself into part of the exhibition. Over the boulevard cars move below while art stretches above, concrete becomes a sculpture whose heavy mass seems to float, and wide glass walls make the light of Los Angeles a building material without weight. With the collection on a single principal level and no mandatory route, art from Egypt, Asia, Europe and America sits side by side without architecture placing any civilization on a higher floor, and the raised galleries free shaded public ground below, with gardens and artworks for people who never enter. The book ends with a long question in concrete and glass, telling everyone who passes beneath or within it that art sometimes needs only a bridge to cross into life.