Why The Broad matters.
The Broad is a porous contemporary-art museum where Bunker Hill's cultural character meets postwar art, dramatic architectural form and an institutional commitment to keeping a major private collection publicly accessible.
Set along South Grand Avenue near West 2nd Street and just steps from California Plaza, the museum occupies a prominent Bunker Hill block where major cultural institutions, towers and landscaped civic spaces descend across the steep terrain toward Downtown. A white cellular envelope wraps the rectilinear building in thousands of angled openings, filtering daylight through an exterior that appears alternately solid and perforated as viewing angles change along Grand Avenue. Entering beneath the façade carries the encounter into a cavernous lobby shaped by the underside of a massive central storage volume, followed by a long escalator that pierces that volume before emerging into an expansive upper gallery. Curving stairways, glimpses into collection storage and daylight entering through the roof and outer shell extend that spatial sequence on the return downward, revealing parts of the building normally concealed inside museums. The result is an institution whose architecture makes exhibition, storage and circulation equally legible, turning the movement between street, collection and gallery into a defining part of encountering contemporary art.
What defines The Broad.
The Broad is best known for Diller Scofidio + Renfro's “veil-and-vault” architecture, a 120,000-square-foot building conceived to unite public galleries with the storage and lending functions of a collection numbering more than 2,000 works. The firm won an invited architectural competition for the project and collaborated with Gensler on a building completed for $140 million and opened in September 2015. Its central vault occupies the middle of the structure as a heavy opaque mass, storing works absent from exhibition or circulating through the foundation's loan program and using its upper surface as the floor of the principal gallery. The lobby forms beneath the vault's carved underside, and viewing windows expose portions of the storage operation as circulation passes through the building. Surrounding that mass, the porous veil functions as both exterior envelope and daylight system, with its cellular geometry admitting filtered natural light into the column-free third-floor gallery. One corner develops an enormous indentation known as the oculus, breaking the regularity of the façade and directing views between the interior and Grand Avenue. Fifty thousand square feet of gallery space occupy two floors, giving the museum substantial exhibition capacity without separating art storage into an unseen secondary building. The completed project received the 2016 AIA Institute Honor Award for Architecture and helped intensify Grand Avenue's concentration of major cultural architecture within Bunker Hill.
The collection behind the building began decades earlier, developing from Edythe Broad's purchases of prints by Georges Braque and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec during the 1960s into a sustained concentration on art produced during the Broads' own lifetimes. Eli Broad joined her collecting activity during the early 1970s, and their acquisitions initially included Vincent van Gogh's 1888 Cabanes à Saintes-Maries and Joan Miró's Painting, March 13, 1933. Their 1978 purchase of an untitled 1975 crosshatch painting by Jasper Johns marked a decisive turn toward contemporary art, followed in 1982 by 20 photographs from Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills. The Broads traded the van Gogh in 1983 for Robert Rauschenberg's 1954 Red Painting, further concentrating their holdings around postwar American art. They created The Broad Art Foundation in 1984 as a lending library designed to place privately held contemporary works into museums and galleries around the world. That program has since made more than 9,000 loans, allowing the collection to circulate internationally even after the Grand Avenue museum consolidated most of its holdings under one roof. Deep concentrations subsequently formed around artists including Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Kerry James Marshall, Cindy Sherman, Takashi Murakami and Mark Bradford, with 200 artists represented across the collection. The museum's permanent home gave physical form to an acquisition and lending strategy developed across several decades, joining extensive single-artist holdings with an institutional system built to keep those works moving between Los Angeles and other museums.
How The Broad fits.
The Broad works as the anchor for a Bunker Hill sequence tracing how orchestral architecture, contemporary-art institution-building and performing-arts education successively turned Grand Avenue into one of Los Angeles' principal cultural corridors.
Begin at Walt Disney Concert Hall, whose origins reach Lillian Disney's 1987 gift of $50 million toward a new performance venue honoring Walt Disney and serving the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Frank Gehry won the architectural competition in 1988, yet financing difficulties and the complexity of the project stretched development across 16 years before the hall opened in October 2003. Yasuhisa Toyota shaped the acoustics of the 2,265-seat auditorium, arranging the audience around the orchestra within a vineyard configuration as Gehry's stainless-steel exterior created sweeping volumes around the performance room. The organ became another architectural collaboration: Gehry worked with organ builder Manuel Rosales on a design whose dramatically angled wooden pipes rise behind the stage, with the completed instrument entering regular concert use in 2004. Continue to Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, founded in 1979 as an artist-centered institution dedicated exclusively to contemporary art and built around a permanent collection assembled from its earliest years. Japanese architect Arata Isozaki designed its Grand Avenue home as a composition of red sandstone volumes organized around a sunken courtyard, placing substantial gallery areas below street level in response to the Bunker Hill site. The building opened in December 1986 with Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art, 1945-1986, an exhibition extending across both the new museum and its existing Temporary Contemporary facility. Isozaki's project became his first major public commission in the United States, establishing an architectural presence on Grand Avenue years before the corridor acquired its later concentration of cultural buildings. Conclude at Colburn School, whose ancestry begins with a small preparatory program USC established in 1950 to provide piano instruction for school-aged children. Richard D. Colburn's California Foundation assumed control in 1980, allowing the institution to develop independently before it moved into its present Grand Avenue campus on June 30, 1998. The school created its Conservatory of Music in 2003 with a full-scholarship model covering tuition, room and board for admitted students, then expanded its campus with a 326,273-square-foot Olive Building in 2007. Its facilities also preserve Jascha Heifetz's Lloyd Wright-designed teaching studio, relocated from the violinist's former property and reconstructed inside the Grand Building as an active teaching room. The progression moves from Gehry's long-developing orchestral hall through Isozaki's purpose-built contemporary-art museum into a performing-arts school descended from a modest USC preparatory program, tracing how architecture, collecting and education built Grand Avenue into a concentrated cultural district.
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