The Broad[Holland Cotter. (September 12, 2015). Review: The Broad Is an Old-Fashioned Museum for a New Gilded Age. The New York Times. Retrieved September 19, 2015.] () is a contemporary art museum on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles. The museum is named for philanthropists Eli Broad and Edythe Broad, who financed the $140 million building that houses the Broad art collections.
History
Since 2008, Eli and Edythe Broad and the Broad Art Foundation had been considering different sites for a museum for the art collection. In November 2008, the news surfaced that Eli Broad had approached
Beverly Hills about building his museum at the southeast corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Santa Monica Boulevard.
[Mike Boehm (November 16, 2009), Cities compete for Broad museum: Santa Monica and Beverly Hills vie for the billionaire's art center as plans expand Los Angeles Times.] In January 2010, he revealed that he was considering a 10-acre parcel on the campus of West Los Angeles College just outside
Culver City.
[Mike Boehm (January 13, 2010), Eli Broad and the mysterious third museum site Los Angeles Times.] Meanwhile, in March 2010, the Santa Monica City Council approved an agreement in principle to lease the city-owned 2.5-acre parcel next to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium to Eli Broad for $1 a year for 99 years while also contributing $1 million toward design costs. Broad would have paid the rest, an estimated $50 million to $70 million.
[Mike Boehm (May 6, 2010), Broad says downtown art museum would draw better than one in Santa Monica Los Angeles Times.]
In August 2010, Eli Broad announced formally that he would build a museum in Downtown Los Angeles.[David Ng and Jori Finkel (August 24, 2010), Eli Broad says Grand Avenue will be site of new contemporary art museum Los Angeles Times.] He agreed to pay $7.7 million for a 99-year lease. Officially characterized as a grant, the money subsidized affordable-housing units at The Emerson, a high-rise residential tower next to the museum.[Mike Boehm (September 9, 2015), Eli Broad, white knight and lightning rod, gets ready to open his own museum Los Angeles Times.]
In an invited architectural competition for the project in 2010, six architects were asked to present preliminary designs. They included Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and his firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture; Swiss pair Herzog & de Meuron; Christian de Portzamparc from Paris; Japanese duo Ryue Nishizawa and Kazuyo Sejima of SANAA; and Diller Scofidio + Renfro from New York.[Christopher Hawthorne (May 25, 2010), "Two architectural firms are finalists for Broad museum project", Los Angeles Times.] Diller Scofidio + Renfro were eventually chosen to design the approximately 120,000-square-foot museum, which includes exhibition space, offices and a parking garage.[David Ng and Jori Finkel (August 23, 2010), "It's official: Eli Broad will build his art museum downtown; Diller Scofidio + Renfro will design", Los Angeles Times.]
In February 2015, Eli and Edythe Broad hosted a public preview of the new building, attracting some 3,500 visitors.[Kelly Crow (May 26, 2015), "Eli and Edythe Broad Build a Museum for Their Art Collection", WSJ Magazine.]
The museum was opened by the Broads on September 20, 2015.[Ellen Olivier (September 19, 2015), "Bill Clinton headlines another star-studded guest list at Broad museum's second 'opening night Los Angeles Times.]
Architecture
Original building
The Broad is housed in a new building designed by architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with
Gensler and structural engineering firm Leslie E. Robertson Associates.
[Sarah Amelar (September 2015), "L.A. Screenplay: An art museum lifts its perforated veil, revealing the repository for its vast holdings", Architectural Record] Its cost has been estimated at $140 million.
[Jori Finkel (June 4, 2014), "Eli Broad says patience is not his strong point", The Art Newspaper.] With a location adjacent to
Frank Gehry's iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall, the museum's design is intended to contrast with its bright metallic perforated
[Holland Cotter (September 12, 2015), "Review: The Broad Is an Old-Fashioned Museum for a New Gilded Age", The New York Times.] exterior while respecting its architectural presence by having a porous, "honeycomblike" exterior.
The design is based on a concept entitled "the veil and the vault". "The veil" is a porous envelope that wraps the whole building, filtering and transmitting daylight to the indoor space. This skin is composed of 2,500 rhomboidal panels of fiberglass-reinforced concrete supported by a 650-ton steel substructure.
[Eddie Kim (September 15, 2015), "How Architect Elizabeth Diller Drew Up The Broad", Los Angeles Downtown News.] The "vault" is a concrete body which forms the core of the building, dedicated to storage, laboratories, curatorial spaces and offices.
The three-story museum has of exhibition space on two floors,[David Ng (August 21, 2015), "Broad museum to show more than 250 works in inaugural display", Los Angeles Times.] with of column-free gallery space[Christopher Hawthorne (August 30, 2015), "The new Broad museum, though efficiently designed, really only comes alive on the periphery", Los Angeles Times.] The roof has 318 skylight monitors that admit diffused sunlight from the north.[Marcy Medina (September 8, 2015). "Los Angeles' Newest Museum: A Preview of The Broad" Women's Wear Daily.] Lobby and exhibitions spaces are connected by a 105-foot escalator and a glass-enclosed elevator.[Christopher Knight (September 13, 2015), "Review: An early look in the Broad museum reveals a show that doesn't quite gel", Los Angeles Times.]
Plans for expansion
In 2024, The Broad announced a $100-million, 55,000-square-foot addition behind the existing structure, which would increase gallery space by 70 percent.
[Jessica Gelt (March 27, 2024), "The Broad announces massive expansion that will increase gallery space by 70%", Los Angeles Times.] Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the addition is to take the form of a second building connecting to the original museum via a third-floor door and passageway leading to a courtyard with views of the sky.
The new gallery space will include artists already in the collection and new artists, e.g.
Cauleen Smith,
Lauren Halsey, and
Patrick Martinez.
Museum plaza
In 2014, plans were published for a public plaza adjacent to The Broad, to be overseen and maintained by the museum as part of its agreement with the city.
[Jori Finkel (February 9, 2014), "Broad Museum in Los Angeles Delays Opening Until 2015", The New York Times.] Designed by the museum's architects, Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, and landscape architect Walter J. Hood, the
Hilda Solis Plaza plaza,
with other streetscape improvements, is estimated to have cost $18 million, with about $10 million coming from redevelopment funds and $8 million from the museum.
[Christopher Hawthorne (February 10, 2014), "Broad museum plaza is welcome, but who will own it?" Los Angeles Times.] It features a grove of 100-year-old
Mission olive.
[ "The Broad Plaza", Diller Scofidio + Renfro]
Construction
The museum's unorthodox facade, which the architects refer to as the "veil", was unusually difficult to fabricate, leading to delays in construction.
In a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court in 2014, the museum sued German fabricator
Seele GmbH, Zurich American Insurance Company and the Fidelity and Deposit Company of Maryland
[Mike Boehm (June 3, 2014), Broad Collection sues engineering firm Seele Inc. over museum facade Los Angeles Times.] for $19.8 million in damages for allegedly failing to deliver the facade's components on schedule.
The Broad and Seele subsequently agreed to continue work on the museum and to face off later over the dispute.
[David Ng (October 29, 2014), Broad museum sets sights on fall 2015 opening in downtown Los Angeles Los Angeles Times.]
Structural engineer
Nabih Youssef Associates Structural Engineers is the Structural Engineer of Record. The museum and parking garage is a 6-story, 110-feet tall structure occupying a city block and enclosing about 250,000 square feet. Typical floors are two-way concrete slabs spanning to concrete columns sitting on a mix of spread footings and belled caissons. The lateral system is a special reinforced concrete shear walls with long perimeter walls on the north & south sides of the building and short buttressing walls in the opposite direction.
Special features include:
-
Veil – Support for the design/build fiber-reinforced concrete veil, a unique cladding structure spanning 70 feet from the roof to lobby level.
-
Vault – 5-feet thick mass concrete, post-tensioned and tapered slab cantilevering 45 feet off battered walls to provide a column-free glass lobby space alongside Grand Ave.
-
Roof – 190-feet long-span steel roof with a concrete lattice diaphragm providing a column-free top floor gallery across the entire building footprint.
The interior (the Vault) is a large opaque volume that seems to hover in the middle of the space. This space holds the museum art and lending library, archive, lecture hall and offices as well as circulation.
The exterior (the Veil) is composed of 313 different glass fiber reinforced concrete hexagonal blades of varying thickness and transparency, encasing a diagonal steel lattice that together forms an airy, cellular exoskeleton draping the interior space. This space acts as the ceiling over the gallery space, allowing natural light into the space.
The Veil is not intended as a primary lateral system, more like a cladding. The remaining shear wall later system is augmented to account for the removal of the veil lateral element. A typical GFRC panel is about 8 x 5 x 1 feet and weighs approximately 1,100 lbs. At the top of the building, the veil wraps over a cantilevered roof that extends 40 feet over the Grand Avenue façade.
The Veil is supported at three points: the connections on the Second Street and GTK, and the major 32 ton, 57-feet long touchdown beam on Grand Avenue. The Grand Avenue touchdown beam sits five feet below the sidewalk.
The touchdown beam can rock about a central pivot point allowing the entire veil structure to slightly "see-saw" back and forth along its plane during a major earthquake. Each end of the beam is allowed to move up and down by ¾ inches.
Collection
The Broad houses a nearly 2,000-piece collection of contemporary art featuring 200 artists,
including works by
Cindy Sherman,
Jeff Koons,
Ed Ruscha,
Roy Lichtenstein and
Andy Warhol, including a 1963 "Single Elvis" by the latter.
Other notable installations include Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away (2013), Ragnar Kjartansson's expansive nine-screen[Robin Pogrebin (April 12, 2015), "At the Helm of a Philanthropist's New Los Angeles Museum", The New York Times.] video The Visitors (2012), Julie Mehretu's 24-feet-wide canvas Beloved (Cairo) (2013), and Goshka Macuga's photo-tapestry Death of Marxism, Women of All Lands Unite (2013).[Deborah Vankin (July 29, 2016), "The Broad acquires 29 new works, keeping an eye on local artists", Los Angeles Times.]
The collection has been described by The Washington Post as including too much "high-end trash" but "even though the bad overwhelms the great, there are great works throughout".
The building also serves as headquarters for the Broad Art Foundation's lending library of contemporary works.
Exhibitions
The Broad's inaugural exhibition featured a selection of more than 250 paintings, sculptures and photographs
by more than 60 artists drawn exclusively from the permanent collection,
including
John Ahearn,
El Anatsui,
Richard Artschwager,
[Eric Gibson (September 16, 2015), The Art of The Broad: A Consensus Collection, The Wall Street Journal.] John Baldessari, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Bernd and Hilla Becher,
Joseph Beuys,
Mark Bradford,
Chris Burden,
Chuck Close,
John Currin,
Eric Fischl,
Jack Goldstein,
Mark Grotjahn,
Keith Haring,
Damien Hirst,
[Jessica Gelt (September 14, 2015), Damien Hirst mural to adorn new Broad restaurant Otium Los Angeles Times.] Jasper Johns, Mike Kelley,
Ellsworth Kelly (four paintings),
William Kentridge,
, Ragnar Kjartansson,
Jeff Koons,
Barbara Kruger,
Yayoi Kusama,
Sherrie Levine,
Roy Lichtenstein (10 paintings),
,
Sharon Lockhart,
Robert Longo,
Goshka Macuga,
Julie Mehretu,
Takashi Murakami,
Lari Pittman,
Richard Prince,
Neo Rauch, Robert Rauschenberg, Charles Ray,
Ed Ruscha,
Julian Schnabel,
Cindy Sherman,
Mark Tansey,
Robert Therrien,
Cy Twombly,
Kara Walker,
Jeff Wall,
Andy Warhol (11 paintings),
David Wojnarowicz and
Christopher Wool.
Restaurant
The museum includes a free-standing restaurant on its plaza,
– Latin for "leisure time" – which Eli Broad developed with Bill Chait of
République and
Bestia restaurants. It features Timothy Hollingsworth, a former head chef of
The French Laundry in
Napa Valley, as executive chef.
In September 2015,
Isolated Elements, 2015, a photographic mural by the artist
Damien Hirst was installed on the south facade of the restaurant; it measures nearly 84 feet by 32 feet and is based on Hirst's 1991 sculpture
Isolated Elements Swimming in the Same Direction for the Purpose of Understanding, a wall-mounted cabinet filled with fish preserved in
formaldehyde.
Management
Funding
As of 2014, The Broad's endowment is at $200 million, thereby larger than any museum in Los Angeles except for the J. Paul Getty Museum.
The overall annual budget is $16 million, which is provided for through established funds.
[Scarlet Cheng (18 February 2022), "Eli Broad's legacy in Los Angeles endures", The Art Newspaper.] The museum offers mostly free admission to the public, but will charge for temporary special exhibitions.
Governance
Besides Eli and Edythe Broad, the Broad's Board of Governors also includes art dealer
Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles Philharmonic CEO
Deborah Borda, restaurateur Michael Chow, businessman
Bruce Karatz, and former ambassador Robert H. Tuttle, among others.
[ The Broad Collection Board of Governors The Broad.]
The museum's director is art historian Joanne Heyler.
Attendance
In its first year, The Broad attracted 753,000 visitors, roughly equivalent to the 2011 attendance at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
[Javier Pes, José da Silva, Emily Sharpe (March 29, 2017), "Visitor figures 2016: Christo helps 1.2 million people to walk on water", The Art Newspaper. ] In 2019, more than 900,000 people visited the museum.
External links
