David Geffen Galleries at LACMA

Designed by Pritzker Prize laureate Peter Zumthor in collaboration with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the David Geffen Galleries are a $724M concrete-and-glass single-floor building that curves along Hancock Park and spans Wilshire Boulevard on LACMA's 20-acre Miracle Mile campus — the culmination of a more than two-decade transformation. The free-flowing main floor is elevated nearly 30 feet above street level on seven semi-transparent pavilions that hold a theater, retail, dining, education facilities and outdoor programming around the W.M. Keck Foundation Plaza. The horizontal, single-level layout deliberately collapses traditional museum hierarchies, placing all works on the same plane with naturally lit perimeter galleries and fully enclosed interior rooms. LACMA expands its gallery space from ~130,000 to 220,000 sq ft. Targets LEED Gold; over 95% construction-and-demolition waste diverted.