Los Angeles’ Broad Museum to Add New Building

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The Broad has announced plans for a new building that will expand the institution by 55,000 square feet (over 5,000 square metres).

‘With this expansion, we intend to amplify The Broad’s commitment to access for all to contemporary art, offering surprising, welcoming, and imaginative experiences that honour the diversity of our public and add to the ever-growing vitality of Grand Avenue, the area that Eli Broad believed in so strongly and that he helped transform into what it is today,’ said Joanne Heyler, the museum’s founding director, in a statement.

Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), the architects behind The Broad’s existing building, the addition is an inversion of the original ‘veil and vault’ concept, which features a white honeycomb structure surrounding a grey core containing art storage.

‘I think of the new building as a companion to the existing Broad,’ said architect Elizabeth Diller. ‘The pair shares DNA, but each has its own distinct character and purpose in constant dialogue with its counterpart.’

The addition will feature new galleries on the first, second, and third floors, two top-floor, open-air courtyards, and spaces for visitors to peruse racks filled with artworks from the collection—a kind of open, more accessible storage.

‘The original Broad was conceived as an unfolding experience starting in the lobby, travelling up the escalator piercing the vault, landing in the third-floor gallery immersed in the collection, then snaking down through collection storage on the way back to the street,’ Diller said.

‘The challenge of adding more space to the building was to retain this intuitive circulation and logic while introducing a set of completely new experiences for the visitor.’

Founded in 2015, The Broad (pronounced ‘brode’) has received over 5.5 million visitors to date. Its collection comprises over 2,000 artworks from the 1950s onwards, including works by Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Roy Lichtenstein, and Takashi Murakami. Recent additions include Katherine Bernhardt, Lauren Halsey, David Hammons, and Patrick Martinez. —[O]

Main image: Exterior rendering of the future Broad expansion from Hope Street. © Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R). Rendering by Plomp. Courtesy The Broad.