LOS ANGELES — After years of planning, construction, ballooning budgets, and design changes, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) new building will finally open this weekend. Spearheaded by the museum’s director, Michael Govan, the ambitious project not only transforms much of LACMA’s hodgepodge campus into a single, sinuous structure but also aims to challenge what an encyclopedic museum can be, renouncing traditional museological divisions in favor of thematic connections across time and space.

“Nineteenth-century museums were a lot about categorization and knowledge, but we live in modern Los Angeles, where migration and interconnectedness are so essential to our daily life,” Govan told a crowd at a press preview this week.

Along the way, LACMA has been the subject of endless debate and controversy, as critics have attacked everything from its blob-like, grey, concrete form that pours across Wilshire Boulevard (Swiss architect Peter Zumthor’s first building in the US) to its staggering $720…