LA’s new The Broad Museum

The Broad Museum is Los Angeles new contemporary art museum. Set on the Grand Avenue, The Broad has been designed by American Diller Scofidio+Renfro Studio, already known to the public as the author of New York High Line Park. Its rich collection, including works by Basquiat, Twombly, Ruscha, Beuys, Rauschenberg and Johns, is the perfect embodiment of the sensitivity and cultural tastes of its founders and sponsors, Mr Eli and Mrs Edythe Broad.

He is a financial wizard, a classic American Dream self-made man. Ranked among the wealthiest persons in the world by Fortune magazine, in 2012 Broad wrote The Art of Being Unreasonable: Lessons in Unconventional Thinking, with an introduction by Michael Bloomberg, an immediate bestseller. His wife Edythe has been among the first to grasp and appreciate the value of Andy Warhol’s work, paying 100 dollars for one of his very first artworks. Mrs Broad’s passion for contemporary art has steadily grown over the years, leading her to buy 34 works by Roy Lichtenstein and the whole of Jeff Koons's most famous works, many of them already paid for before even being made.

Today’s collection features 2000 works of art with an overall value of 2,2 billion dollars, collected and showcased in the new museum as a further proof of Los Angeles central role in contemporary art market. The building, which cost over 140 million dollars, was opened to the public in September 2015 and has been designed in collaboration with Gensler team of architects with the purpose of both preserving and exhibiting this priceless cultural heritage. Structured on several levels, the building covers 12.000 sq.m and includes exhibition halls, an artwork open storage area and the headquarters of the The Broad Art Foundation's library, one of the largest art libraries in the world.

The exterior walls of the building, known as “veil-and-vault”, are covered by an exoskeleton featuring a honeycomb structure which provides filtered natural daylight, illuminating the precious artworks inside. The Museum “veil” lifts at the building’s corners, welcoming visitors into a spacious lobby equipped with bar and bookshop, reminiscent of the shady atmosphere of a prehistoric cave. An escalator passing through the vault, where artworks are collected and stored, leads to the first floor with an exhibition area featuring over 7-meters high ceilings. A public square planted with century-old olive trees in the south wing of the museum completes the project commissioned by the two philanthropists.

www.thebroad.org

Opening photo: A DETAIL OF THE VAULT OF THE LOBBY AND THE ESCALATOR LEADING FROM THE GROUND FLOOR TO THE EXHIBITION AREA OF THE BROAD MUSEUM, LOS ANGELES