Why you should visit The Broad Third Floor Galleries.
You should visit the third floor of The Broad because it’s where Los Angeles’s creative pulse is most vividly on display, a bright, open temple to contemporary expression.
The floor’s natural light floods through honeycomb skylights, washing over iconic works by Jeff Koons, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, and Cindy Sherman. Each piece converses with its neighbor in a symphony of color, critique, and culture, a visual diary of the last half-century. The space itself feels alive, constantly rearranged by curators who treat the layout like choreography rather than architecture. The floor is airy yet electric, designed to evoke both curiosity and contemplation. You don’t walk through this gallery, you glide, pulled forward by the magnetic hum of modern genius. And because the collection rotates, each visit offers a different constellation of art, ensuring that even repeat guests feel the thrill of discovery anew.
What you didn’t know about The Broad Third Floor Galleries.
What you didn’t know about the third floor galleries is that their design is a study in sensory engineering, every wall, window, and floor tile exists to shape your emotional cadence as you move through it.
The Broad’s architects designed the honeycomb skylight pattern to filter Los Angeles sunlight in a way that mimics the tonal gradation of a painter’s wash, diffused, even, and alive with motion. The walls, made of specially coated panels, absorb certain sound frequencies, maintaining a quiet that amplifies thought. Even the spacing between works is intentional, forcing subtle changes in tempo and breath as you move from one to the next. The curators, often working directly with living artists, curate not just what you see but how you feel while seeing it, the rhythm of perception itself. This third floor, more than any other space in the building, is The Broad’s living thesis: art as atmosphere, emotion as architecture.
How to fold The Broad Third Floor Galleries into your trip.
To fold the third floor galleries into your trip, begin your museum visit here, it sets the emotional register for everything else you’ll encounter.
Arrive when the museum opens to avoid crowds and give yourself the freedom to linger. Take a slow circuit through the major works, but don’t rush to identify or intellectualize them; The Broad rewards intuition over interpretation. Pause where the light shifts and the air feels still, that’s where the art tends to whisper loudest. From here, descend to the Infinity Mirrored Room or the museum’s lower installations, allowing the experience to evolve from expansiveness to introspection. When you leave, stop at the plaza outside to reflect, the building’s skin of concrete veils now echoing the intricate emotional architecture you just walked through. In that moment, Los Angeles feels less like a city and more like an unfinished canvas still in your hands.
Hear it from the Foresyte community.
Kind of wild how a museum looks like it’s breathing. Free to enter, full of giants like Warhol and Basquiat, and somehow still feels super laid back.
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