Michael Govan On Building a Museum for the 21st Century

When LACMA announced its expansion in 2019, few fully grasped what it entailed—or why it was necessary. The museum already stretched across a sprawling campus, but much of its infrastructure had been in use for over fifty years. As LACMA’s ambitions and international stature expanded, those once-iconic buildings began to show their age, becoming less of a monument to modernism and more of a logistical burden.

By the time Michael Govan was appointed director, it had already been determined—back in the early 2000s—that the museum’s aging structures would likely need to be replaced. Years of deferred maintenance, shifting seismic codes and growing structural concerns had made the decision all but inevitable. In Los Angeles, earthquake regulations can impose a kind of architectural expiration date. But the real question, Govan recalls in a conversation with Observer, was what exactly would be built—and what it would look like. “This was a unique opportunity to rebuild a museum on a metropolitan scale in the United States, where most of the major civic institutions we reference—like the Met, which is 150 years old—were created within a much older framework.”

With that in mind, Govan began to consider what a museum built for the 21st Century and beyond should look like—particularly in a city like Los Angeles, where the multicultural fabric of the community was already reflected in a collection of over 150,000 works. After years of failed attempts to raise the necessary funds, it was under Govan’s leadership that the financial puzzle finally came together. “We got a great community together, and in partnership with L.A. County, we raised $850 million,” he says. Of that, $725 million was allocated to the building itself. Govan’s vision for what a museum could become in a global society propelled the project forward. “I saw this as a beautiful opportunity to connect the local and the global.”

Throughout the process, the guiding aim was to make LACMA a space where historical collections could reflect and serve the richness of contemporary life. For Govan, this meant more than simply building a new museum; it actually meant building several. The idea wasn’t just expansion, but distribution, extending LACMA’s physical and cultural presence across the city. And, he makes plain, the plan is far from complete. There are already ambitions to expand further, including into South Los Angeles.

The project was entrusted to Pritzker Prize–winning architect Peter Zumthor who, in collaboration with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, designed a sweeping, serpentine structure of concrete and glass to replace four aging museum buildings and unify the campus with a dramatic elevated form that stretches across Wilshire Boulevard. Named in honor of David Geffen’s extraordinary $150 million gift, the new building also received $125 million in support from the County of Los Angeles. Visitors access the exhibition-level galleries via floating staircases and elevators on both the north and south sides of the boulevard. The north wing bears the name of Elaine Wynn, trustee and board co-chair, whose $50 million leadership gift launched the Building LACMA campaign. The south wing, for now, remains unnamed, its plaque left blank, awaiting the next major donor.

In terms of how the structure meets its museographic intentions, the new Geffen Galleries embrace and encourage a sense of fluidity, fostering dialogue between people, cultures and temporalities. Zumthor has envisioned an architectural space that draws on the legacy of museography pioneers such as Lina Bo Bardi, the horizontal clarity championed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Oscar Niemeyer’s embrace of natural curves that echo and harmonize with their surroundings. The result is an organic environment that mirrors the museum’s ambition to engage with a plurality of narratives through both space and structure.

Fluidity and connection are also central to the rehang and broader program, which aim to move beyond traditional museographic frameworks based on nationality, chronology and medium. Instead, the museum is now organized thematically, in a structure intended to evolve over time with curatorial input.

“The curatorial team decided to organize the world around themes, or ‘muses,’ as we call them, such as the muse of oceans and water, which includes the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific,” Govan explains. The result is a radical shift in both presentation and concept: rather than being arranged by nation, works and artifacts are grouped across continents and regions—Europe, the East, the Americas (North and South) and Africa—emphasizing centuries of exchange, interrelation and shared histories.

This approach, Govan notes, is especially resonant in the context of the United States and the Atlantic, which for centuries—particularly before the jet age—served as a central artery for global movement. “This theme emphasizes fluidity, migration, trade and interconnectedness, as opposed to the rigid classifications of the 19th Century,” he adds. The result is a more dynamic, responsive and relational way of organizing the museum’s holdings.

The architecture was designed to reflect and reinforce this curatorial framework—favoring fluid sections over enclosed rooms, with clusters that can be reconfigured without disrupting the visitor’s movement through the space. Everything unfolds on a single level, which accounts for the building’s expansive footprint: 110,000 square feet, all on one floor, with two main entrances. As Govan explains, the design is intentionally organic, with windows throughout that maintain a constant visual exchange with the city beyond. “There’s no hierarchy—no clear front or back. The narrative is open, and there’s no prescribed journey within the space,” he emphasizes.

At the same time, the building creates meaningful opportunities for public art and engagement beyond the museum walls. The new Geffen Galleries introduce 3.5 acres of park-like public space on both sides of Wilshire Boulevard, conceived to be activated with art, events and performances.

Public art has long been central to LACMA’s identity, with its existing plazas already home to iconic works such as Urban Light by chris burden and Barbara Kruger’s monumental mural. Now, the entire 75,000-square-foot ground plane of the W.M. Keck Plaza on the north side of Wilshire will be transformed by a major new commission from Mariana Castillo Deball titled Feathered Changes, which will also extend to the south side. Additional site-specific works by artists including Liz Glynn, Thomas Houseago, Shio Kusaka, Pedro Reyes and Diana Thater will further animate the public spaces, reinforcing LACMA’s role as an open, civic-oriented cultural hub.

But one of the soon-to-be Instagram-famous, absolute blue-chip highlights will be Jeff Koons’s Split-Rocker (2000), a monumental 37-foot-tall sculpture adorned with living plants and flowers. The acquisition, installation and long-term maintenance of this bold yet ecologically attuned work is made possible by a generous gift from LACMA life trustee Lynda Resnick and her husband, Stewart, through their foundation. Drawing on the tradition of 18th-century European topiaries, the sculpture fuses one half of a cartoon-like pony’s head with one half of a similarly stylized dinosaur’s head—its surface “painted” in living vegetation. An internal irrigation system supports the plants, allowing the sculpture to evolve over time in direct response to its environment and the botanical life it sustains.

“By giving equal emphasis to both the indoor and outdoor experience through accessible public art, we’ve created spaces that engage the community,” Govan notes. “On Friday nights, for most of the year, we host jazz concerts and regularly draw three to four thousand people.” Having spent much of his life in New York, Govan was eager to bring some of that urban park energy to Los Angeles. The result is a generous expansion of free, public park space that integrates art, food and opportunities for gathering—an especially meaningful gesture in a city as dispersed as L.A., where many neighborhoods still lack a central plaza or communal meeting point. “We had a vision of creating something truly unique—rooted in our locality but with a global perspective. And we’re incredibly excited about what we’ve been able to achieve,” he says with enthusiasm.

On making space for community

Since June 2025, select groups—including LACMA donors and members—have had the chance to preview the dramatic interior spaces in their raw state, before any artworks are installed. Determined to stay on schedule despite the setbacks caused by the devastating February fires, Govan was equally committed to carving out a brief window for visitors to experience the building ahead of its official opening for several reasons. Chief among them was the desire to foster a sense of ownership and spark early, authentic enthusiasm that could translate into lasting engagement and support. “The idea was to invite the community in early, to help them feel that the building belongs to them,” he explains. “I didn’t want to wait until April, especially when the building already looks finished from the outside. I wanted to show it’s real—it’s happening.” Of course, the museum now faces the monumental task of installing 3,000 artworks.

For the opening preview in June, Govan invited acclaimed saxophonist and jazz composer Kamasi Washington to perform Harmony of Difference, a six-movement jazz suite that explores the beauty of contrast and unity through the musical concept of counterpoint—diverging melodies that ultimately resolve into a harmonious whole. The performance featured an ensemble of more than 100 musicians from diverse cultural and racial backgrounds, many of them Los Angeles-based artists who have long collaborated with Washington. “I thought it would be wonderful to give the building a blessing,” Govan says, referring to what he called a “sonic preview.” For him, Harmony of Difference offered a powerful metaphor for LACMA’s new philosophical and organizational approach. “It was also a way to get it on people’s radar—to show that something beautiful, new and fresh is coming, with an opening in April,” he adds. The concert capped a week and a half of programming that included video previews from curators, community workshops and other public events. In total, more than 18,000 people passed through the building during the early preview period.

The moment felt especially meaningful in the wake of the February fires and everything Los Angeles had endured. “This moment of relief and community energy was vital after such a difficult time for the city,” Govan acknowledges. That spirit of renewal was also one of the driving motivations behind organizing the preview events. “We worked really hard to make this happen, especially considering how challenging construction projects were after the fires. But we had to stay on track for the April opening—this project means a great deal to the entire L.A. community.”

Yet when asked whether LACMA might serve as a model for what a 21st-century museum—perhaps even the museum of the future—could or should be, Govan is quick to reject the idea of there being a single blueprint. “The diversity of museums is essential, and we shouldn’t think of them as serving one specific goal,” he says. “They need to adapt to their context and purpose.” Govan speaks from experience. Before arriving at LACMA, he oversaw the development of an entirely new institution as director of the Dia Art Foundation, where he led preparations for the 2004 opening of Dia:Beacon in upstate New York.

Underscoring the importance of site-specific thinking, Govan contrasts his work at LACMA with Dia:Beacon, where he helped shape a 300,000-square-foot museum dedicated to just twenty-four artists, focused on immersive, sustained encounters with individual practices from a particular generation. At LACMA, he is focused on what he calls the “harmony of difference.”

“We want to showcase and help people feel the splendor and power of the interrelationships between many cultures, especially in a place like Los Angeles,” he says, noting how this idea resonates globally in an increasingly interconnected world. It’s about engaging with the richness of human cultures, art and narratives—not only through learning, meditation or exchange, but also through the emotional force of creativity itself.

“It’s not about categorizing or compartmentalizing,” Govan concludes, “but about recognizing the power of interconnectivity—what happens when things come together.”

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