Why Veil & Vault matters.
Veil & Vault is a dramatic architectural composition where Bunker Hill's cultural character meets porous concrete, concealed art storage and a building conceived around the physical relationship between public exhibition and an immense private collection.
Set along South Grand Avenue near West 2nd Street and just steps from the avenue's concentration of cultural institutions, the architectural system occupies the museum's full city-block footprint, wrapping its galleries in a pale cellular exterior around a dense gray core. Deep honeycomb openings create a thick outer surface whose individual cells change orientation across the façades and roof, allowing the enclosure to appear alternately solid and permeable as viewing angles shift. Entering beneath lifted corners of the outer shell carries the encounter directly below the curved underside of the central mass, then upward through that mass toward the expansive gallery resting above it. Glimpses through interior openings expose portions of the concealed storage zone as circulation passes through the building, turning spaces normally isolated from a museum's public areas into a recurring architectural presence. The result is a building system whose outer enclosure and inner core make exhibition, storage, circulation and daylight legible as parts of one architectural idea.
What defines Veil & Vault.
The Veil and Vault at the Broad Museum is best known for Diller Scofidio + Renfro's decision to make art storage a primary architectural element and surround it with a porous exterior shell. Eli and Edythe Broad commissioned the firm in 2010 to create a permanent Los Angeles home for their contemporary art holdings and The Broad Art Foundation's worldwide lending program, with Gensler collaborating on realization of the design. Elizabeth Diller developed the two-part concept around a central requirement unusual for a major museum: works absent from the galleries or circulating through the lending program would remain physically central to the building. The resulting vault contains 36 million pounds of concrete and occupies the middle level between first- and third-floor exhibition spaces, with its sculpted underside forming the ceiling of the lobby and its upper surface supporting the principal gallery floor. A 105-foot escalator penetrates the mass on the ascent, a cylindrical glass elevator passes through it vertically and a central staircase descends beside windows opening views into collection storage. The surrounding veil uses 2,500 fiberglass-reinforced concrete panels carried by 650 tons of steel, with 380 different molds required to produce the varied cellular geometry. An 83,000-pound touchdown beam carries much of that exterior structure at Grand Avenue and rests on an assembly engineered with springs and shock absorbers to accommodate seismic movement. The completed $140 million museum opened in 2015 with 120,000 square feet, turning a functional division between public art display and collection storage into the fundamental architectural order of the entire building.
Daylight engineering drove another highly specialized branch of the design as the veil transitioned from vertical façade into the roof of the principal gallery. The third-floor exhibition room spans 35,000 column-free square feet beneath 318 skylight monitors oriented to harvest diffuse northern light, reducing dependence on electric illumination through much of the day. Each roof cell required careful shaping to admit indirect illumination without exposing artworks to uncontrolled direct sun, extending the cellular exterior into a highly calibrated environmental system. The roof also projects through a 40-foot cantilever above the gallery, forcing the outer structure to operate simultaneously as enclosure, lighting apparatus and major structural span. Fabrication became an international undertaking, with fiberglass-reinforced concrete components produced through facilities in Germany, the Czech Republic and the United States before assembly in Los Angeles. Individual veil panels average 1,100 pounds, and nearly one-third of the mold inventory was devoted exclusively to the deeply distorted oculus where the exterior surface bends inward toward the vault. That indentation breaks the otherwise regular block geometry on the Grand Avenue elevation, creating a concentrated deformation where the two architectural systems appear to press against one another. Engineering and fabrication transformed Diller's initial distinction between porous outer shell and opaque inner mass into thousands of individually resolved components, allowing the same architectural system to control illumination, structure and enclosure across five sides of the museum.
How Veil & Vault fits.
Veil & Vault works as the anchor for a Bunker Hill sequence tracing how postwar redevelopment produced radically different solutions for cultural architecture, vertical corporate construction and pedestrian movement across the remade hill.
Begin at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, which opened its permanent Grand Avenue home in 1987 after Japanese architect Arata Isozaki won the commission for an institution established through an unusual partnership of artists, collectors and civic leaders. Isozaki responded to Bunker Hill's rising office towers by sinking much of the seven-level museum below Grand Avenue, leaving only four floors above street level and arranging galleries beneath and around a terraced courtyard. Red Indian sandstone, geometric volumes and a barrel-vaulted administrative roof give the low complex a deliberate architectural independence from the glass-and-steel skyline surrounding it, and the project became Isozaki's first building in the United States. Continue to Bank of America Plaza, completed in 1974 by A. C. Martin & Associates as the Security Pacific Building during the redevelopment district's rapid conversion into a corporate center. The tower stands diagonally within a park-like site whose low landscaping and open ground separate its vertical granite piers from surrounding streets. Alexander Calder's immense orange steel Four Arches occupies the plaza through a commission connected with the Community Redevelopment Agency's public-art program, binding large-scale sculpture directly to the corporate landscape created on the rebuilt hill. Conclude at Bunker Hill Steps, Lawrence Halprin's 1989 intervention designed to reconnect elevated Bunker Hill with the older downtown blocks below after redevelopment had erased much of the historic street fabric linking the two. Halprin organized the steep descent through 103 steps, terraces, landscaping and a central watercourse, using the vertical grade itself as the organizing element of a pedestrian passage between 5th Street and Hope Street. The project formed part of the larger Library Square development that also financed restoration and expansion of Los Angeles Central Library, joining private construction with public circulation and preservation. The progression moves from Isozaki's deliberately sunken museum through a corporate tower isolated within sculpture and gardens into Halprin's grand pedestrian descent, tracing three architectural responses to the immense physical and civic reconstruction of Bunker Hill.
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