I’m tempted to quote Dionne Warwick’s famous line “LA is a great big freeway” as a breezy lede to the Los Angeles County Art Museum’s preopening of the David Geffen Galleries, if only to insert the singer and psychic’s name into the pages of LARA, but Los Angeles is not a great big freeway. However, Peter Zumthor’s infrastructural art museum is (as I’ve written before) an overpass.

The overpass is certainly another well-worn trope—some soaring CalTrans feats and others wrapped in chain link and hung with NO ICE banners. Yet it’s also a moment of spatial trespass, where one part of the urban fabric folds back on another.

In late June, CEO and director Michael Govan led press through the new museum building, winding our group through the monochromatic gray concourses that span Wilshire Boulevard. For weeks, immigration and other federal agents had snatched (and continue to snatch) migrants from public life, leaving behind vacant fruit stands and taco trucks. Gathering at LACMA to admire the imposition of Zumthor’s monumental form on Miracle Mile offered a privileged distraction from news of ongoing raids. Compartmentalization is a luxury.

Straggling behind the rest of the press corps, I paused above the median. Whooshing traffic filled the galleries with white noise that soon would mingle with a performance by Kamasi Washington and his hundred-person band. Clumps of musicians were positioned throughout the museum, creating a sonic Doppler effect as one strolled between spaces. Artists, architects, and VIPs came out for the experience, parading up sixtysome steps like they were boarding a cement ark.

Inside, watermarks on the less-than-Swiss-quality concrete work proved a kind of Rorschach test. Floor-to-ceiling windows (uniform panes, alas, not curved glass) offered a series of deadpan panoramas. (Ed Ruscha, who attended the event alongside Lauren Halsey and architects Barbara Bestor and Liam Young, was probably pleased.) LA baked in the harsh afternoon light, appearing flat and shaggy from the elevated perspective. To the west, the overwrought façade of the nearby Petersen Automotive Museum and the bubblicious Academy Museum collapsed into a thin skyline punctuated by palms. Chris Burden’s Urban Light (2008) and Tony Smith’s Smoke (1967/2005) were rendered puny against ambiguous expanses of beige paving. As I looked eastward, Bruce Goff’s majestic Japanese Pavilion (1988) filled the frame, crowned in horns as expressive as the tusks of a woolly mammoth stuck in tar.

With no artwork in the galleries, Los Angeles was on display. Was this Zumthor and Govan’s plan all along, to turn the metropolis inside out, Inception style? Most of the renderings released over the past decade cast LA as background actor—not star. Fires, raids, National Guard troops, and protests exposed the city in high-def so it would play itself once again.

Dusk settled, and the city took on a gentler glow. The darkness of the concrete floor—previously unrelenting to my eye—picked up the color of the sky. Ensconced behind the glass, looking out at brake lights, I thought about a scene from Paris, Texas (1984). Director Wim Wenders tracks Harry Dean Stanton’s character as he walks, hands in pockets, across the overpass at Balboa Boulevard. The camera keeps with him while he traverses over a dozen lanes of Interstate 5. We hear a raving man out of the frame. “They will snatch you from your hot tubs,” he preaches at the whooshing traffic. His words, shouted from his overpass pulpit, stir current anxieties. “There will be no safety zone!”