By the time the David Geffen Galleries opens later this month, it will have been nearly 20 years since Michael Govan took the helm of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), called up Peter Zumthor, and said, ‘I need an architect.’ The Pritzker Prize winner and the museum director have both recounted that exchange countless times – how Govan promised to bypass any competition and persuade his board of trustees, how Zumthor could not resist the offer to reimagine the encyclopedic museum. It was a romantic beginning for two dreamers, but their dream was something concrete (quite literally) meant for a context – the second-largest city in the country – in which the art and architecture ecosystems have undergone relentless upheavals and transformations in the intervening years. Amid all this, Zumthor’s imposing elevated building – winding concrete sandwiching walls of glass, and on stilts to avoid and preserve the ancient La Brea tar pits that still bubble up on the grounds – has arrived. It seems to beg the question: What does this starchitect-designed museum offer the altered local ecosystem now?

One change feels particularly relevant to how a museum operates in Los Angeles –  the embrace of decentralization. Even as the late mega-patron Eli Broad built his own museum on Grand Avenue, the downtown street he imagined as the city’s Avenue des Champs-Élysées, the long struggle to force Los Angeles’s art world to centralize dissolved with the gallery boom of the 2010s. ‘Geography doesn’t matter anymore,’ Simmy Swinder, who then ran a gallery in the West Adams neighborhood, told me at the time. Art spaces began popping up all over, in clusters or all alone, accepting sprawl rather than fighting it. Then devastating fires wiped out, along with so much else, the homes of a thriving community of artists. Federal funding cuts left nonprofits with thin to nonexistent margins. The disenfranchised critical establishment, which had plenty of questions and concerns about the LACMA building, fractured further.

What LACMA offered, when it debuted on Wilshire Boulevard in 1965, was everything. It became the city’s first standalone, comprehensive art museum after at long last disentangling itself from the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, and Art, where a curator once had to deinstall a Degas exhibition just for the weekend to make way for a science fair.

Nothing about its opening went smoothly. The funders feuded over naming rights and the choice of architect. They compromised on William Pereira, whose local firm had never worked on an art museum. The one thing Pereira got right was the way LACMA’s complex opened out onto the boulevard as if beckoning passersby to just pull over. But otherwise, the consensus was that the building itself, with galleries that felt isolating and a bit drab even before they started leaking, was a disaster. As Art & Architecture editor John Entenza wrote at the time, the result was ‘so egregious’ because it was ‘a building designed not for a private client, who alone would suffer, but for the public.’

However, the success of Pereira’s building mattered less than the fact that it existed as a repository for the region’s collections, a gathering place, and a locus around which art supporters could rally. Within a year of the museum’s opening, it had hosted local artist Ed Kienholz’s controversial survey which saw crowds line up down the street after the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors had threatened to defund the museum due to alleged pornography. Within 3 years of its opening, Black preparators and security guards formed the Black Arts Council (BAC), a group aimed at pressuring LACMA to diversify its collections and exhibitions, while also building a community that reached far beyond the institution’s walls.

That ability to reach beyond, forced on the institution when the BAC formed, grew to become one of LACMA’s strengths, especially as, under Govan’s leadership, it began to reimagine itself for the 21st century. By then, LACMA had added buildings by Renzo Piano and Bruce Goff to the Pereira campus, giving it the feeling of a small town sending forth emissaries, such as the conservators it dispatched to care for the beloved Watts Towers in 2011 and the teaching artists sent to the Charles White Elementary School near MacArthur Park, where LACMA started programming as early as 2007.

Govan’s plans for the new building have always been accompanied by promised satellites that would bring the museum’s collections and resources to other parts of Los Angeles and resonate nicely with the increasing decentralization of the city’s art ecosystem. The Charles White Elementary School Gallery (once home to the Otis College of Art and Design) became one such outpost, with renovations completed in 2018. Another proposed satellite, in South Los Angeles Wetlands Park, will not materialize, but the museum has instead pivoted, as the finishing touches went into the Zumthor building, to sharing its collection with the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College, the Las Vegas Museum of Art, and most recently with the gallery at California State University, Dominguez Hills in Carson.

Critics of the new LACMA building have pointed out a disconnect between promising a dispersed program and putting so many resources into a single staggeringly expensive (USD 724 million) building commissioned with little public input, especially in a moment when more restrained museum models are becoming prevalent. Consider architect Annabelle Selldorf’s approach to expanding the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, a responsive, integrative take on a campus that, while far smaller than LACMA’s, similarly bore the mark of multiple iconic architects, including Irving Gill and Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates.

But while a trend toward more economical, ecological, inside-out architectural interventions has pushed the starchitect discourse into the rearview mirror, so too has the fact that critics, stretched thin in a fractured publishing industry, have more pressing issues, as evidenced by the second issue of the Los Angeles Review of Architecture, a brilliant offshoot of the independent New York Review of Architecture, published late last year. The issue focuses on the housing crises and infrastructure challenges casting a shadow over preparations for the 2028 Olympic Games, the challenges and possibilities of rebuilding in Altadena after the fires, and what real-estate developer Rick Caruso’s upscale malls tell us about him and his political ambitions.

That does not leave much room to contemplate the success or failure of a single museum building, though Mimi Zeiger, who served as co-editorial advisor for the issue, contributed a brief consideration on Zumthor’s masterpiece, which she had viewed while it was still empty. Zeiger had expressed concerns over the plan and its execution across the years, but her description of how the concrete floor glowed at dusk suggested a building that was, at least, provocative. ‘With no artwork in the galleries, Los Angeles was on display,’ Zeiger wrote. ‘Was this Zumthor and Govan’s plan all along, to turn the metropolis inside out, Inception style?’

As a metaphor, the glass walls’ overt, outward-facing transparency holds promise for a museum that, beyond the responsibility to steward and share its collection, has a duty to respond to the city it inhabits rather than to impose a singular vision upon it. We are about to see where that promise leads.