LOS ANGELES — The Broad, a new contemporary art museum being built by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, across the street from Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Museum of Contemporary Art, will open to the public on September 20.
The $140 million museum, which is designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, will be home to the nearly 2,000 works of art in the Broad Art Foundation and the Broads’ personal collections, including masterworks by Jeff Koons, Jasper Johns, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Barbara Kruger and Roy Lichtenstein
The Broad’s innovative 120,000-square-foot design features public gallery spaces on the first and third floors, with a central “vault” housing collection storage and staff offices seeming to hover between. Upon entering the lobby, visitors will travel up a 105-foot escalator through the concrete vault and emerge into the third-floor gallery, which features 23-foot ceilings and 318 skylights that filter diffused sunlight.
Upon exiting the third floor, most visitors will again descend through the vault via a central stairwell, which offers glimpses of the artwork in the archive that may be displayed in future exhibitions.
Wrapped around the Grand Avenue elevation of the building, like a “veil,” is a porous exoskeleton made of concrete panels and steel that filters natural daylight into the building’s interior and establishes lines of sight between the museum and the street.
The Broad is also building a 24,000-square-foot public plaza adjacent to the museum that features a grove of 100-year-old Barouni olive trees and a large lawn.
