Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Listen for the hum of Wilshire Boulevard first. Buses sigh at the curb, and engines idle at the lights. Then the sound softens as you walk toward a grid of grey iron lampposts standing in tight rows. Late in the day, the bulbs glow against the pale sky. Under the trees nearby, you may catch a faint smell of asphalt, sharp and oily. That smell is real, and it is very old. Welcome to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which most people here simply call LACMA.

Start with those lampposts, because nearly everyone does. This is Urban Light, a work by the Los Angeles artist Chris Burden, installed in 2008. There are just over two hundred of them. Every one is an antique cast-iron street lamp that once lit a real street in Southern California, mostly from the 1920s and 1930s. Burden collected them over several years and restored them. Walk inside the grid and look closely. The lamps are not identical. Their bases, fluting and tops come from different neighbourhoods and different decades.

That detail matters more than it seems. Los Angeles has a reputation as a city without memory, always tearing down and starting over. Urban Light pushes back against that idea. It takes everyday objects from the city's own streets and gathers them into one quiet room without walls. At night it works as a meeting place, a photo spot and a landmark for drivers on Wilshire. It has become one of the most photographed places in the city.

Now, about that smell of asphalt. LACMA sits inside Hancock Park, beside the La Brea Tar Pits. Here, natural asphalt has seeped up from underground for many thousands of years. Ice Age animals became trapped in the sticky ground. Scientists have pulled the bones of mammoths, sabre-toothed cats and dire wolves from these pits. Here is the first surprise for many visitors. During construction work around the museum, crews have uncovered fossils too. The art museum and the prehistoric past share the same ground.

The museum itself is younger than many people expect. For decades, art in Los Angeles was shown together with history and natural science in one combined county museum. In the early 1960s, the art collection became its own institution. It opened on this Wilshire site in 1965. Since then, it has grown into the largest art museum in the western United States. Its collection holds well over a hundred thousand objects, from ancient pottery to video installations.

The range is the real point here. LACMA is not built around one region or one period. You can move from Egyptian and ancient Mediterranean pieces to Islamic art, to Korean and Chinese ceramics, to Latin American art, to European paintings, in a single afternoon. The museum has strong holdings of art from the Americas, including work from ancient Mexico. This reflects the city around you. Los Angeles is a place of many languages and many homelands, and the collection tries to speak to them.

If you want one famous painting, look for a small canvas by the Belgian painter René Magritte. It shows a smoking pipe. Under it, in neat French handwriting, are the words that mean, this is not a pipe. The work is called The Treachery of Images. It is a joke and a serious idea at the same time. It is not a pipe, after all. It is a picture of a pipe. Many visitors are surprised to find the original here in Los Angeles.

For contemporary art, the main stop has long been the Broad Contemporary Art Museum. This building was designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano and opened in 2008. Look for its bright red exterior stairs and escalators on the outside of the structure. Nearby stands the Resnick Pavilion, also by Piano, a long, light-filled hall for large temporary exhibitions. Its roof uses sawtooth skylights, a shape borrowed from old factory buildings, to bring soft, even daylight inside.

Inside the contemporary galleries, watch for another work by Chris Burden called Metropolis II. It is a kinetic sculpture, which means a sculpture that moves. More than a thousand toy cars race along a dense web of tracks and roads, past miniature towers. When it runs, the noise is loud and constant, like a traffic jam shrunk to the size of a room. It is a fitting piece for this city. Check whether it is running during your visit, because it only operates at certain times.

Here is the second surprise. Walk to the north side of the campus, toward Sixth Street. A huge granite boulder rests on two concrete ledges above a long sloping trench. This is Levitated Mass, by the artist Michael Heizer, installed in 2012. The rock weighs around 340 tons. It came from a quarry in Riverside County and travelled slowly across Southern California on a giant custom transporter, moving mostly at night. Crowds came out on the streets to watch it pass.

Walk down into the trench. As you descend, the boulder passes directly over your head. It is a strange feeling to stand under that much stone. You know it is safe, but your body is not fully convinced. Some visitors laugh nervously. Others go quiet. Look at the surface of the rock. You can see natural seams and colour changes in the granite. Above you, the sky frames the stone, and the traffic noise falls away.

One more building is worth finding. The Pavilion for Japanese Art, designed by the American architect Bruce Goff, has curving forms and an unusual organic style. Inside, translucent panels filter the daylight, much like paper screens in a traditional Japanese house. Meanwhile, the centre of the campus has been transformed. Several older museum buildings were demolished to make way for the David Geffen Galleries, designed by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. Its long, curving concrete form crosses over Wilshire Boulevard itself.

That bridge over the road says something about Los Angeles. Here, the street is not an obstacle to culture. It runs right through it. Just west of the museum, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures fills a former department store building, so film, fossils and painting all sit within a short walk. This stretch of Wilshire is known as Miracle Mile, a name from the early days of car culture, when shops were designed to catch the eye of passing drivers.

Before you leave, go back to the lampposts for a moment. Stand in the middle and look up. The iron rises around you in rows, each lamp from a different street and a different time. Listen again to Wilshire behind you, the buses and the horns. Breathe in that faint smell of tar from deep underground. Art, ancient bones and a working city street all meet here. Take a slow walk out, and notice which detail stays with you.