The Broad
Contemporary art museum on Grand Avenue, wrapped in a perforated concrete veil over its storage vault.
The Broad opened in September 2015 on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, opposite the Walt Disney Concert Hall. It houses the collection assembled by the philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad, which numbers more than two thousand works of post-war and contemporary art by artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Kara Walker, Takashi Murakami and Yayoi Kusama. Admission to the permanent collection galleries is free, although timed tickets are usually needed and special exhibitions are ticketed separately.
Diller Scofidio + Renfro designed the building around what they called the veil and the vault. The veil is a honeycombed skin of glass-fibre-reinforced concrete panels that filters daylight into the top-floor galleries, while the vault is the dark mass of archive storage in the middle of the building, visible through windows from the stairs and lift. A cylindrical escalator carries visitors up through the vault to a single unbroken gallery floor of some 3,000 square metres beneath the veil's skylights.
Highlights
- The perforated concrete veil filtering daylight into the third-floor galleries
- Escalator ride up through the dark storage vault
- Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirrored Room installations
- Free entry to the collection galleries, with timed tickets
