a museum that moves five feet
LACMA just opened a 900-foot building that floats on 56 base isolators. Plus: Trimble bought the AI that reads your contracts, and the ABI is the closest to growth it’s been in three years.
A museum opened in Los Angeles last Sunday. It’s over one hundred feet long, made out of concrete, and cantilevered over Wilshire Boulevard.
The crazy thing—it can slide five feet sideways.
Peter Zumthor designed it. SOM engineered it. Clark Construction built it. Fifty-six of some of the biggest base isolators ever manufactured sit underneath it. In a real earthquake, the whole building moves and the people inside barely feel a thing.
This is the kind of project that reminds the industry what it can build.
Here’s Issue #3.
01 · AI + TECHNOLOGY
Trimble just bought the AI that reads your contracts.
On April 2, Trimble announced it’s acquiring Document Crunch.
Document Crunch is the AI that reads construction contracts and flags the stuff you’d otherwise miss at 11pm the night before signing—payment traps, notification windows, and indemnification clauses your firm wouldn’t touch on a good day.
Already deployed on 10,000+ projects, it has an impressive list of clients including Balfour Beatty, Barton Malow, andDPR.
It’s also the third major contech AI deal this spring. Autodesk closed its Rhumbix acquisition on April 2 (same day). Procore bought Datagrid back in January. The big three are all buying AI companies—fast.
The next shortlist you’re on, at least one competitor will have contract-risk AI bundled into their Trimble stack.
02 · MARKET + MONEY
The ABI is 0.2 points from positive. For the first time in three years.
March Architecture Billings Index: 49.8.
The growth threshold is 50.
That’s the closest it’s been since early 2023. Backlogs are at 6.6 months — the healthiest since December 2023. The West flipped positive for the first time in over a year.
Now read the other number. Design contracts just declined for the 25th straight month.
Translation: firms are billing hard on work they already signed. What they’re winning now is still shrinking.
“Billings could soon see positive growth for the first time in three years… ongoing economic and geopolitical challenges pose significant risks to recovery.”
— Richard Branch, AIA Chief Economist
If your 2027 BD plan is built off a 2025 backlog, you’re already late.
03 · PROJECT + BUILD
The LACMA building that can slide five feet.
Zumthor is 82. This is his first built work in the United States.
900 feet of concrete spanning Wilshire Boulevard. Ten towers holding it up withantilevers reaching 80 feet.
$720 million. 8,600 workers on and off site. It opened to members April 19 and will open to the public on May 4.
But the real story isn’t the size, it’s what’s underneath. Scroll down.
Scenario: You’re targeting a municipal water authority. The RFP hasn’t dropped. You’ve got 12 months of board minutes, the adopted budget, the CIP, and local press coverage.
Analyze the attached documents from [Water Authority]: 12 months of board minutes, FY26 adopted budget, current 5-year Capital Improvement Plan, and the last 6 months of local press.
Ignore what the formal RFP criteria would be. I want the three things this client is MOST worried about that will NOT appear in evaluation criteria — political pressures, budget anxieties, inter-agency tensions, community concerns.
For each of the three:
1. The concern in one sentence.
2. Evidence across the documents — cite meeting dates, budget line shifts, press quotes.
3. How a consultant could credibly speak to that concern in a pre-RFP meeting, without it sounding like positioning.
Be specific. If the evidence is thin on a point, drop it.
Asking AI to summarize the RFP tells you what the client wrote. This tells you what they didn’t.
The building that moves
How SOM got a 900-foot concrete museum to survive an earthquake by letting it slide 5 feet.
Last Sunday, a new museum opened in Los Angeles. The David Geffen Galleries at LACMA spans 900 feet of concrete over Wilshire Boulevard — six lanes of traffic, roughly 50,000 cars a day moving underneath it.
Beneath the whole thing sit 56 seismic base isolators. If a fault line decides today’s the day, the building slides — up to five feet in any direction. The art stays on the walls. You barely feel it.
Welcome to the David Geffen Galleries.
How did we get here?
Back in 2009, LACMA decided its old galleries had run their course. They hired Peter Zumthor to reimagine them. He’s a Swiss architect, Pritzker Prize winner, famously deliberate, and at the same without a completed building in the United States.
Zumthor drew something that pushed boundaries.
One building. One floor of galleries. Raised 30 feet in the air on concrete towers. Spanning across Wilshire Boulevard with no expansion joints, no interruptions, ust one continuous 900-foot floor of art.
“Sounds unbuildable” is the correct first reaction.
SOM got the job of making it buildable.
The earthquake problem
A California building that’s concrete, 900 feet long, ando joints.
Any structural engineer reading that list is already wincing. Big concrete buildings deal with seismic forces the way cars deal with speed bumps: you slow down and break the trip into pieces. Expansion joints. Control joints. Shorter spans.
LACMA and Zumthor said no. The art floor had to read as one room.
So SOM made the building float.
All 900 feet of it sits on 56 base isolators — 40 primary ones at the corners of the ten towers, plus 16 smaller ones supporting the ground-floor program. Each primary isolator weighs 40,000 pounds, its dish over nine feet in diameter, manufactured in Vallejo and trucked down one at a time.
Think of each one as a giant pendulum. A friction pendulum, technically. The building sits on the pendulums. The pendulums sit on the foundation.
During an earthquake, the ground does what the ground does. The pendulums flex. The building up top moves — but slowly, smoothly, and not very much relative to itself.
Five feet in any direction. That’s the designed movement.
The art stays on the wall because the wall and the art are moving together, as a single unit, riding on top of the isolators. It’s the same trick an aircraft carrier uses to land planes in rough seas. The deck moves. The plane doesn’t notice.
The shrinkage problem
With the earthquake problem solved, then there’s another problerm.
Concrete shrinks as it cures. On a 900-foot continuous pour with no expansion joints, unaddressed shrinkage would tear the building apart before the opening ribbon gets cut.
SOM’s answer was post-tensioning.
After the concrete sets, steel cables running through every slab, rib, and wall get pulled tight from the ends. The cables squeeze the concrete back together as it tries to shrink away from itself.
360 miles of cable in one building is impressive
Then they split the pour into more than 100 distinct concrete placements, modeled in sequence for months. Each placement had to cure at the right time, in the right relationship to the ones around it. The base isolators at the ends were freed early during construction so the building could inch around as it cured — sliding about 1 to 1.5 inches at each end, exactly as the engineers had predicted.
The building moved while it was being built. Then it was designed to move again, on demand, whenever the Pacific Plate feels like it.
And the concrete itself is new
Standard structural concrete uses portland cement. Portland cement has an embodied carbon problem the industry has been chasing for two decades.
SOM subbed in alternatives. Custom mixes across the building.
The finished structure uses 20% less energy than the ASHRAE baseline for museums — a category where climate control is life support for the art, not a nice-to-have.
Why this matters
The final cost was$720 million with 8,600 workers on and off site performing 2.3 million total work hours. Consultants include Clark Construction as GC, Largo Concrete, Buro Happold, KPFF, AECOM, Simpson Gumpertz & Heger, Seele, Geosyntec, Fehr & Peers, and ACCO.
The architecture press is covering the galleries, the travertine, the Rothkos. Fair enough, but the amazing piece of work is the building. and here’s what it says to the rest of the industry.
A building like this doesn’t exist in a delivery model where everyone’s playing defense. Somebody trusted the structural engineer when she said put the whole thing on rubber pucks. Somebody trusted the architect when he said no joints. Somebody trusted the GC when the pour sequence went from “handful” to “one hundred plus.”
That trust doesn’t get built in a proposal. It gets built long before in conversations, in past projects, in technical people who can still tell a client we can do this and mean it.
The AI tools showing up in this issue are going to change a lot about how AEC firms pursue work, but they’re not going to change that.
The Geffen Galleries are a reminder of what the pursuits are for.
Document Crunch
Most construction AI summarizes documents. Document Crunch reads contracts for what’s missing. Flags the clauses that don’t match. Finds the notification windows buried on page 214. Checks your subcontract flow-downs against the prime. It’s deployed on 10,000+ projects.
Shines: pre-award contract review and subcontract pass-through checks.
Limited: it’ll find the clause, not tell you what to negotiate for instead.
Verdict: Try it. Trimble just bought it. Pricing will likely change.
49.8 — March 2026 AIA Architecture Billings Index. Highest since early 2023. 25 consecutive months of contract declines underneath. (AIA)
6.6 months — Average firm backlog. Highest since December 2023. (AIA)
53% — A&E firms using AI tools, up from 38% year over year. (Deltek Clarity, 697 firms)
349,000 — Net new workers US construction needs in 2026. 456,000 in 2027. (ABC)
11.8% — US average effective tariff rate as of April 8. Highest since the early 1940s. (Yale Budget Lab)
10,000+ — Construction projects running Document Crunch before Trimble bought it. (Construction Dive)
The Artificial Intelligence Show — The Human-to-Machine Writing Scale
86,000 people took the New York Times’ AI writing quiz. Most preferred the machine. Paul Roetzer uses the result to introduce his human-to-machine writing scale and asks the question that actually matters: not whether AI can write, but when should we let it?
Three takeaways that map onto AEC marketing:
The public can’t tell AI writing from human writing anymore. Neither can your selection committee. “We’ll just make sure it sounds like us” stopped being a differentiator last year.
Atlassian cut 1,600 roles and cited AI. The same conversation is happening behind closed doors at firms across industries..
Pick a point on the scale and say it out loud. Firms avoiding AI and firms hiding their AI use are making the same mistake — no stated position. A written policy on what your firm writes and what it automates is becoming a recruiting signal.
AIA Conference on Architecture & Design 2026
June 10–13 · San Diego Convention Center
Seven weeks out. Advance registration closes June 9.
Go for: AI vs. Reality: Trust, Perception & Differentiation in Architectural Communication. Finally, a session asking whether AI in your pursuit narrative costs you trust with clients who can spot it.
Skip: The first-day business-of-architecture sessions if you’ve been before as they can be repetitive. If you haven’t gone before though, go.
Real work: Brand receptions on the Gaslamp. That’s where principals are candid about which sectors they’re actually pulling BD budget from.
Pfluger Architects · Proposal Specialist · Texas, hybrid
K–12 and higher ed firm founded 1972, 130+ people across 5 Texas offices. You lead strategy, writing, production, and interviews. Posted 3 days ago. Direct apply link goes to their Pinpoint portal.
Sr. Marketing/Proposal Coordinator · Level 10 Construction · San Diego, CA
ENR Top 60 GC. Life sciences, corporate tech, healthcare, and entertainment. They just built the Frontwave Arena. You own end-to-end proposals, Cosential/Unanet CRM, and the full pursuit calendar. 4.3 stars on Indeed. San Diego.
Want to list a role with us? Hit reply.
That’s Issue #3.
If this was useful, forward it to the structural engineer on your team. The LACMA deep dive is for them.
- AEC Wire