Abducted on Wilshire
A Short Critical Review of the David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art by Peter Zumthor by Michael Farris
Michael Farris is a licensed architect based in New York City. He graduated from RISD with a B.Arch in 2023 and is an incoming M.Arch II student at Harvard. (@mikeyfarris)
From the outside, it’s heavy. Horizontal. Unapologetic. It doesn’t announce itself the way buildings usually do. It just sits there, on Wilshire, the way a very large and very confident thing sits, waiting to be identified. Shoulders back, legs crossed. You approach it carefully, looking for reasons to be disappointed. You don’t find them.
Before you enter, you are greeted with a (above) daunting hieroglyphic of the building’s plan. To the untrained eye, it looks as if it were a document released in the May 2026 Pentagon UFO file dump. It reads less like a museum and more like a fragment of military infrastructure, or the floor plan of something that should not be publicly discussed. Part navy ship, part weapons facility, who really knows.
Then the building takes you inside.
And once it has you, you are no longer in a museum so much as inside a carefully controlled labyrinth. Post abduction, you’ve found yourself in a corn maze. You’re eight years old again, somehow scared you can’t find your mom at the pumpkin patch. At first, everybody likes to feel a little lost. The disorientation initially reads as intrigue. But then you want to get out. And then you have to pee. And then you want a glass of water. MOM!
For the architects in the room: the building’s plan most closely resembles Zumthor’s own Therme Vals, the Swiss Baths. Many small rooms enclosed by one large room. But at Vals, each room is different. They each contain different temperatures of water, and they invite you to plunge from pool to pool, blissfully content.
In LA, it’s different. The rooms are all the same, differentiated only by the slightest pigment change in the concrete. You’re yearning for some sectional drama, a skylight, a James Turrell. Please! But no. Just a lot of art. Too much art? Perhaps. Actually, yes. There is a point, somewhere around hour two, when the art stops being art and becomes wallpaper. Beautiful, museum-quality wallpaper, but wallpaper nonetheless. You’ve stopped looking. You’re just walking. You’re just trying to find the door.
And maybe that is the real trick of the building. It does not overwhelm you with spectacle. It slowly drains you of certainty. It abducts you, holds you for a while, and then tries to return you to Wilshire with the distinct feeling that you have accomplished something.
But it’s okay, like, really okay, because at the end of the day, your $20 Erewhon smoothie will do what Peter Zumthor’s UFO could not: return you back to Earth.