LACMA's new David Geffen galleries

On 19 April, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened the new David Geffen Galleries, designed by the much-acclaimed Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. The building has been twenty years in the making and has attracted as much criticism as praise, both in the lead-up to the opening and afterwards.

The building has cost a staggering $724 million. It provides new exhibition space for approximately 3,000 works of art from the museum's collection of more than 150,000 objects, in 110,000 square feet of exhibition space. The building itself, however, provides 347,500 square feet of space once its seven structural legs are factored in, housing a restaurant, bookshop and 300-seat auditorium, among other things. The intention is to give outdoor lectures beneath the building, in its shade: the dream of blurring outside and inside, of providing both exhibition and public space, is something few other museums can offer.

The general criticism can be divided between the business of the museum, the building, and the curatorial presentation. Some aspects have created lesser ripples for our own specialist interests than for the wider circles of art and media critics. However, the complaints are worth taking note of, as they help to explain what is radically good about this new institution. The museum is barely sixty years old, so the ability to create such an important new structure highlights its importance within the United States, and the persuasive power of its director, Michael Govan.

The initial budget was $600 million and involved replacing the four existing buildings, including three that were part of the original William Pereira museum campus of 1965. Govan argues that the Broad Contemporary Art Muscum and the Resnick Pavilion, added in 2008 and 2010 respectively, created an extra 100,000 square feet of exhibition space. Therefore, to say that the new David Geffen Galleries offer 10,000 square feet less than the galleries they replaced is a false comparison; the whole project needs to be judged as one. As for the delays and overrun of the budget, these were created in part by the discovery of fascinating animal fossils in the soft earth adjoining the neighbouring La Brea Tar Pits.

Zumthor has been in practice for around forty-seven years. Govan wanted him for LACMA as soon as he became the museum's director, in 2006. Zumthor has plenty of fans in the architecture world but, interestingly, this is his first building in the United States. He is known for his uncompromising minimalist style, and for being concerned with how people physically experience a built space through all five senses.

At LACMA, this philosophy is articulated in galleries on one level with no hierarchy, contained within a large, organic form-inkblot or amoeba-like depending on your response-that spreads across Wilshire Boulevard. Inside, the building is wrapped by floor-to-ceiling glass windows, which frame views across Los Angeles on the outside and, on the inside, an interstitial pathway that encourages people to wander around artwork placed along its route, drawing them into twenty-six internal galleries with thematic displays. The windows are sheathed in curtains commissioned from Reiko Sudō to help protect the artwork from UV light without blocking the views. The result is an artwork in itself: two textiles, matte and gloss, that shimmer with the light and the view beyond. The walls are all poured concrete, creating a scamless surface that nonetheless gives a sense of the handmade.

It is said that light is Zumthor's key building material, and that his architecture must be experienced firsthand; the play of light and shadow across the galleries, and in the changing warmth of the light as it passes through the curtains, is a gift to visitors that could probably not be repeated anywhere else.

Within the galleries the walls are painted with coloured washes, adding to the sensory feel. For textile people, this creates an effect akin to a dip-dyed fabric with varying depths of colour; it reminded me, too, of the faded paint washes found on limewashed plaster.

The presentation of the galleries and objects has divided opinion. There are few didactic panels: everything is presented equally, without an obvious hierarchy of age, material or medium. This radical approach to organisation allows visitors to wonder and discover objects, and demonstrates a conviction that visitors are visually literate and curious, rather than an assumption that the museum's mission is purely didactic and encyclopaedic.

Since the museum's collection is not itself encyclopaedic, but has great strengths and equally notable weaknesses, this is, to my mind, a refreshingly bold approach: a real vote of confidence in the ability of the curatorial staff (forty-five of them for the initial display) to develop narratives and draw out telling connections.

The exhibits are grouped around the oceans rather than traditional art-historical boundaries, emphasising fluidity between cultures, time and space. For Govan, this reflects the demographics of the diverse city that is Los Angeles and its position as a gateway to the Pacific Rim; for us, it positions textiles as one of the most important cultural connectors and vehicles.

And textiles are a definite winner, in terms of both organisation and presentation, the latter sometimes within large picture frames. The colour and texture of the textiles on display are the ideal counterpoint to the texture of the concrete walls. The textile department has reportedly been the busiest during the installation, resulting, I understand, in more textiles now on display in the museum than at any point since its establishment.

Instead of explaining the connections discussed and highlighted, it may be more interesting to simply report on the best of the textile displays. While carpets are underrepresented, the Ardabil Carpet packs a real punch. Displayed on a low platform in one of the muscum's fully enclosed, low-light galleries, it is surrounded by LACMA's important Persian and Indian manuscripts. Arthur Upham Pope, the early 20thcentury historian of Persian art, wrote at length about the distinctive colour character of individual carpets, and the Ardabil's is unmistakably blue, a blue that is echoed in the walls of the room, making the space vibrate with the carpet's powerful presence.

One of the most successful galleries is the one devoted to Indonesian batik and cultural exchange, showing gifts from the Inger McCabe Elliott and Mary Hunt Kahlenberg collections, from garments to wall-mounted pieces. In terms of demonstrating the fluidity of design and the interconnection of different cultures, the intertwining of Dutch and European with Chinese, Indian and Islamic motifs could not better illustrate the curatorial theme underwriting the whole concept of the galleries. It is exciting to see the muscum play to its strength, and a reminder that Indonesian batik is not often shown with such aplomb in major museum displays.

Another display that has received a lot of attention, and works very well, is called Textile Conversations: Africa and Black America. The spontancous, improvisational approach to creativity is shown by a group of Mbuti barkcloth and Kuba textiles from Central Africa. Their dynamic, asymmetric patterns are juxtaposed with quilts made by Black American women in the 20th century, whose compositions reflect a similar restless energy and shifting points of emphasis.

The lack of labelling here is a frustration, because the two American quilt makers were mother and daughter, which could be emphasised as showing the mechanism of heritage. The five quilts are from the collection of Eli Leon, whose own theories about there being a shared compositional approach between these quilt makers and African textile traditions has recently been challenged; this, too, would have been worth drawing attention to.

At the heart of the Indian Ocean galleries is a comprehensive survey of the Kashmir shawl, including a rare map shawl showing the Kashmiri workshops at the peak of their creativity. It illustrates the benefits of the workshops' competitiveness, but also of the obsession with ever-finer detail. This leads to a display of other textiles that trace how the material was adapted for dress and influenced fashion throughout Europe and Asia, eventually spawning industrial production in Europe. This may not be the story of colonial power and mercantilism that is most urgently arresting for today's visitors, but it is a demonstration of the way that textiles intertwine narratives and connect communities, and are a bridge for muscums that have the imagination to break away from the traditional art-historical canon and structures.

Many of the great museums grew from a 19th-century approach, conceived and built like palaces or temples of art. The David Geffen Galleries intellectually and physically flatten out this idea. This is a more considered, more radical building, one that seems to place itself within its landscape and position the purpose of the museum above the ego of the 'starchitect'. This is a blessing, since too often modern museums bend the will of the objects, and the viewer, to the building's needs.

For someone like me, confident in my knowledge of what I am looking at, visiting was a joy (even if I can't say that I ever I fully understood where I was supposed to be in terms of oceans and currents). My comfort in the fluidity of it all may be peculiar to me, but it's a real pleasure to see people looking at objects rather than congregating around boards or screens. Whether it encourages the same thrill in people less sure of their art-historical comprehension will be the real question, one that will only be answered by analysis of visitor numbers over time-and success will depend on the skill of the curatorial staff in continuing to connect engaging narratives between objects and the collection. I encourage everyone to visit, and to disagree with me.