Designs Unveiled for The Broad Museum

The designs of The Broad Art Foundation (The Broad), a contemporary art museum to be built on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, were revealed by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad and architect Elizabeth Diller.
Dubbed “the veil and the vault,” and designed by world-renowned architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the three-story museum will feature a unique porous honeycomb “veil” that wraps the building and is visible through an expansive, top floor sky-lit gallery that will be home to great works of contemporary art drawn from the 2,000-piece Broad Collections assembled over the past 40 years.

The 120,000-square-foot project will feature almost an acre of column-free gallery space, a lecture hall for up to 200 people, a ground floor multimedia gallery, a public lobby with display space and a museum shop. Also to be included is a state-of-the-art archive, with study and art storage space that will be available to scholars and curators who want to research works in the collection and borrow artworks for their institutions through The Broad Art Foundation.
The public entry to the museum will complement the landscaped plaza to the south that is part of the Grand Avenue Project’s master plan. Its lobby will include a bookshop and espresso bar. Visitors will then journey upwards via an escalator, tunneling through the archive, arriving onto 40,000 square feet of column-free exhibition space bathed in diffuse light.
Presenting a 24-foot-high space, the area will be fully adaptable according to the curatorial needs.
The exhibition exit will be made through a winding stair through the vault, offering behind-the-scenes glimpses into the vast holdings of the Broad Collections and the foundation’s lending library operations, leading visitors back to the lobby.

With its construction predicted to begin in late summer and to be completed in two years, The Broad's inaugural exhibition will feature 200 of the most iconic works from the Broad Collections, including many recent additions to the collection and works never seen before in Los Angeles.
The exhibition show the artworks of Doug Aitken, El Anatsui, John Baldessari, Jean Michel Basquiat, Mark Bradford, Joseph Beuys, Chuck Close, Marlene Dumas, Sam Francis, Ellen Gallagher, Mark Grotjahn, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Glenn Ligon, Sharon Lockhart, Takashi Murakami, Shirin Neshat, Cady Noland, Lari Pittman, Neo Rauch, Robert Rauschenberg, Charles Ray, Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Struth, Robert Therrien, Cy Twombly, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol and Christopher Wool, among many others.

For three years after the inaugural exhibition, The Broad will feature rotating exhibitions every four months, focusing on artists represented in distinctive depth in the collection, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andreas Gursky, Damien Hirst, Anselm Kiefer, Jeff Koons, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Cindy Sherman, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol and Christopher Wool.
During exhibitions, curators will be able to include lent works that will enhance the exhibition's theme, the perspetive about the artist, etc.

Founders of The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and The Broad Art Foundation, which they established to advance entrepreneurship for the public good in education, science and the arts, as well as supporting other areas such as scientific and medical research, Eli Broad and his wife, Edythe, are devoted to philanthropy.