The Diller Scofidio + Renfro Designed Broad Museum Opens in LA

It's time to take an art pilgrimage out West.

September 7, 2015, 2:00pm

The Broad museum, on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles; photo by Benny Chan, courtesy of The Broad and Diller Scofidio + Renfro

The Broad museum designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler, will open its doors on September 20 in Downtown Los Angeles. The “veil-and-vault” structure will house an impressive postwar and contemporary art collection by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad.

The museum trademark is an elaborate veiled exterior that covers the building like a giant net. The wrapping is made up of 2,500 fiberglass and concrete elements to allow sunlight to penetrate the interior. The veil itself is laced with more than 400 different trapezoidal shapes.

“The building team turned to a 3D modeling tool called Digital Project, developed by Gehry Technologies. The reason for using DP is the complicated nature of the shapes and the geometry of the building," said Roger Fricke, the general contractor of the building to California Construction online.

The Broad museum's third floor galleries with skylights and interior veil; photo by Iwan Baan, courtesy of The Broad and Diller Scofidio + Renfro

The three-story building will house the entire Broad collection, comprising of 2,000 pieces of art in a concrete vaulted foundation. "Rather than relegate the storage to secondary status, the 'vault' plays a key role in shaping the museum experience from entry to exit," said the museum. Upon entering the building, visitors will experience a womb-like smooth lobby made of Venetian plaster with escalators that lead to the museum’s collections, library, and conference rooms on the second and third floors.

The museum’s pièce de résistance is a column-free gallery about an acre long with 23-foot-high ceilings bathed in natural light from the buildings veil. The floor could very well be the art room of the century. The inaugural exhibit will include works by 60 artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, John Baldessari, Mark Bradford, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger and Kara Walker to name a handful of greats. But we really don’t mean to name drop!

The Broad museum, on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles; photo by Iwan Baan, courtesy of The Broad and Diller Scofidio + Renfro

The first-floor galleries will feature the Broad’s recent to-die-for art acquisitions such as Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away (gulp) and an 82-foot-long painting by Takashi Murakami based on the 2011 Tohoku, Japan earthquake and tsunami.

The lesson learned here is that the Broads have good taste in architecture, design, and art collecting. The opening of the museum should prove to be the highlight of the US art world this year.