The designs of the new building of The Broad Art Foundation, a contemporary art museum called ‘The Broad’, have been unveiled by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad and Diller Scofidio + Renfro architect Elizabeth Diller at a press conference at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.
The three-storey museum features a unique porous honeycomb ‘veil’ that wraps the building and is visible through an expansive, top floor sky-lit gallery that will be home to great works of contemporary art drawn from the 2,000-piece Broad Collections.
Located across the street from Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Museum of Contemporary Art, The Broad will also serve as the headquarters for the foundation’s worldwide art lending library. Dubbed ‘the veil and the vault,’ the museum’s design merges the two key components of the building: public exhibition space and the archive/storage.
Featuring almost an acre of column-free gallery space, a lecture hall for up to 200 people, a ground floor multimedia gallery and a public lobby with display space and a museum shop, the 120,000 square feet project will also include state-of-the-art archive, study and art storage space. Rather than relegate the archive/storage to secondary status, the ‘vault’, plays a key role in shaping the museum experience from entry to exit. Its heavy opaque mass is always in view, hovering midway in the building. Its carved underside shapes the lobby below, while its top surface is the floor of the exhibition space. The vault is enveloped on all sides by the ‘veil’, an airy, cellular exoskeleton structure that spans across the block-long gallery and provides filtered natural daylight.
The public entry to the museum will be on Grand Avenue and will complement the landscaped plaza to the south that is part of the Grand Avenue Project’s master plan. The museum’s ‘veil’ lifts at the corners, welcoming visitors into an active lobby with a bookshop and espresso bar. Visitors will then journey upwards via an escalator, tunneling through the archive, arriving onto 40,000 square feet of column-free exhibition space bathed in diffuse light. This 24ft-high space is fully flexible to be shaped into galleries, according to the curatorial needs of each installation or exhibition. Visitors exit the exhibition space and descend back to the lobby through a winding stair through the vault that offers behind-the-scenes glimpses, through viewing windows, into the vast holdings of the Broad Collections and the foundation’s lending library operations.
According to Diller, the main objective of the design team is to hold its ground next to Gehry’s much larger and exuberant Walt Disney Concert Hall through contrast. As opposed to Disney Hall’s smooth and shiny exterior that reflects light, The Broad will be porous and absorptive, channeling light into its public spaces and galleries. The veil will play a role in the urbanisation of Grand Avenue by activating two-way views that connect the museum and the street, Diller added.
The inaugural exhibition, when the museum opens in two years, will feature 200 of the most iconic works from the Broad Collections, including many recent additions to the collection and works never seen before in Los Angeles. The total cost to construct the museum and parking garage will exceed $130 million. Gensler will serve as the executive architect.
The Broad Foundations were established by entrepreneur and philanthropist Eli Broad to advance entrepreneurship for the public good in education, science and the arts. The Broad Foundations include The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and The Broad Art Foundation.
