This concrete colossus is home to the new David Geffen Galleries<\/a> of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma), a $724m mothership designed by the fabled Swiss architect Peter Zumthor<\/a>. It is less a museum than a mighty piece of infrastructure, a 110,000 sq ft warehouse-cum-bridge, jacked up nine metres in the air and looming above the street with a brooding, muscular heft. Two decades in the making, and subject to tortuous years of delays, controversies and cost escalations \u2013 building on a tar swamp in a seismic zone is not straightforward \u2013 it finally opens this weekend.<\/p>\n The Fitzcarraldian feat is the brainchild of Michael Govan, who became Lacma\u2019s director in 2006 with an ambition to build a museum like no other, using the promise of a dazzling structure to lure donations of artworks and dollars ($125m came from LA county, the rest was fundraised). Govan cut his teeth at the Guggenheim, and on Frank Gehry\u2019s Bilbao outpost, where he clearly got a taste for the transformative fairy dust of signature architecture. He later moved to Dia:Beacon, in New York\u2019s Hudson Valley, where he commissioned Zumthor for a project that was ultimately unrealised<\/a>. At Lacma, he was determined to make a monument for posterity, at any cost.<\/p>\n
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