The founders of The Broad, the couple Ely and Edith Broad, are renowned patrons and collectors of post-war and contemporary art: their collection of 2000 pieces is considered one of the best in the world. With their money, several cultural institutes have already been built in the United States according to the projects of prominent architects: Richard Mayer was involved in the Los Angeles Art Center, Zaha Hadid - the Museum of the University of Michigan, Renzo Piano - the Museum of Modern Art as part of LACMA - the Los Angeles County Museum. It was LACMA who hoped to receive Broad's collection as a gift or at least on a long-term lease, but Eli Broad made an unexpected move five years ago, announcing that he would build his own museum for his collection.
The location was chosen for the conditional center of Los Angeles - the section of Grand Avenue, where the largest and newest public buildings of the city are concentrated: next to The Broad is
Walt Disney Concert Hall by Frank Gehry (this project was saved by Eli Broad at one time, having allocated a large sum of money in a crisis moment), across the street is the building of Arata Isozaki, the Museum of Contemporary Art MOCA (this institution Broad has also supported for a long time), next to it is the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels Raphael Moneo and Art School No. 9 Coop Himmelb (l) au.
In addition, at the moment, the plan to turn this part of the city, famous for its "automobile culture", into an attractive area for pedestrians, is "revived", in particular, by the efforts of Frank Gehry, who proposed for Grand Avenue
multifunctional complex. All in all, this plan is already many years old, and it includes various measures, including the opening of a new metro station. Therefore, The Broad has an addition in the form of an area of 2300 m2. But this is not the only gift from Eli Broad to the townspeople: admission to his museum is free.
A museum designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, first of all, serves as a storehouse for the collection of the Broad couple, which, with the help of the Broad Art Foundation (the fund is also based in the new building), serves as a kind of library subscription: works from there are constantly lent out for display to various museums around the world. A complex program - a storehouse, usually closed to visitors, a secondary room that should take up more than half of the building - left its mark on the project. But the architects did not set up public spaces on the storage facility as on a plinth, but placed the storage facility in the center of the building - on the conditional second floor. Visitors pass through it on a 32-meter escalator on their way up, from the lobby on the first floor to the exhibition halls on the third, and go down the stairs. At the same time, the storage area is visible to them through thoughtfully placed glazed openings: it is, like a trip on an escalator through the "thickness of concrete" to the bright rooms above, designed to create a "cinematic" impression, which is more than appropriate for Los Angeles.
From the outside, such a structure of the building is not readable: it is covered with a white "veil", as the architects call it: a white facade made of fiber-reinforced concrete, cut with regular holes that regulate the amount of light in the interior. The "Veil" is raised above ground level, inviting the visitor into the museum. In addition, the exterior of the museum is enlivened by a glazed "oculus" (again, the term of the authors of the project), more reminiscent of a dent in the neat volume of the building.
On the first tier, in addition to the cave-like vestibule, there is a multimedia space, an exhibition hall, part of a storehouse, and a museum shop. Above - the aforementioned "storage", administrative premises, lecture hall. On the third floor - 3250 m2 of exhibition space, illuminated mainly through openings in the roof and completely devoid of supports. Under the building - despite the "pedestrian" aspirations of the Los Angeles authorities - there is a 3-tiered parking lot for 366 cars. The project budget was $ 140 million, another 18 million was spent on decorating the square and the street space adjacent to the museum.
