Untitled Document

The Broad Foundation and Diller Scofidio + Renfro
Turn the Museum Inside Out

Los Angeles art and architecture patron Eli Broad selected New York architects <a href='http://www.dsrny.com/'>Diller Scofidio + Renfro</a> in a private competition this winter to design the <a href='http://broadartfoundation.org/'>Broad Art Foundation</a>, a 120,000-square-foot contemporary art museum that will house his personal collection of 2,000 pieces. Dubbed the “veil and the vault,” the design places a porous, honeycombed veil around an opaque art archive. All images courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Conceptually, the building’s parti is easy to understand. All other spaces are defined around the storage vault. The archive vault forms the roof of the entrance lobby, and it’s the gallery space’s floor. A tunneling escalator will take visitors from the lobby level to the galleries. The museum’s success will depend on how the quality of natural light is filtered through the veiled exoskeleton.

From the gallery space, patrons will use a winding stair to reach the lobby level again. This staircase will offer behind-the-scenes glimpses (via viewing windows) into the Broad Foundation archives and the curatorial work that goes on there. Putting this kind of back-of-the-house activity up front is a typical gambit for Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

The museum is located at Los Angeles architecture’s center of gravity: Grand Ave, where buildings by Frank Gehry, FAIA, Rafael Moneo, Hon. FAIA, Wolf Prix, Hon. FAIA, Arthur Erickson, FAIA, and Thom Mayne, FAIA, fill the neighborhood. Always experimental, confrontational, and self-assured the work of Diller Scofidio + Renfro can’t help but react to its next door neighbor on Grand Ave. in downtown Los Angeles: Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. “Our goal for the museum is to hold its ground next to Gehry’s much larger and very exuberant Walt Disney Concert Hall through contrast,” Liz Diller says. “As opposed to Disney Hall’s smooth and shiny exterior that reflects light, The Broad will be porous and absorptive, channeling light into its public spaces and galleries.”

The public entrance to the museum will be on Grand Ave., where the “veil” will lift up at the corner to allow in light and views to the outside, activating the visitor lobby with urban vitality, somewhat similarly to the entrance of Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s recently completed Alice Tully Hall in New York. The lobby will feature a bookstore and espresso bar.

Fourty-thousand square feet of open gallery space with 24-foot ceilings will provide plenty of room for massive works of contemporary sculpture and art. This space will be completely column-free and will be able to be configured in any way. The Broad is perhaps the apotheosis of the trend towards massive scales of open gallery space in contemporary art museums. Herzog and de Meuron’s <a href='http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/'>Tate Modern</a> in London introduced this trend with a new decade in 2001, and Renzo Piano’s, Hon. FAIA, <a href='http://www.lacma.org/info/TransformationPhase1.html'>recent addition</a> to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art introduced it to Eli Broad, who donated $60 million towards its design and construction.

The generous scale of the galleries will make it well-suited to house mammoth art works like Damien Hirst’s Judgment Day, a colossal glass and gold-fronted cabinet containing 30,000 fake diamonds, which The Broad just acquired. Growing museum galleries to fit works like these illustrates an inversion of how museums have traditionally assigned formal emphasis to spaces. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, museums were mostly designed in line with the classical styles of their day: stately facades full of Beaux Arts detail and then a series of rational, strictly choreographed corridors and galleries on the inside. But since Frank Lloyd Wright’s <a href='http://www.guggenheim.org/'>Guggenheim</a> in New York, museums have become more formally expressive and exuberant on the outside even while their interior spaces have become less programmed and more open and ambiguous; as if museums are being turned inside out. The outward appearance of the past century’s museums would have worked as libraries or courthouses, and the interior gallery space of the new class of museums could work as a performing arts studios or (as Andy Warhol might suggest) a factory. It’s hard to imagine how one could make museum gallery spaces any less defined and open than Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s building, but Mr. Broad will have a chance to try again—he’s building another art museum at Michigan State University with <a href='http://broadartfoundation.org/msumuseum.html?sid=56'>Zaha Hadid</a>, Hon. FAIA.

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