Plans For The Broad Museum Revealed
Los Angeles' Grand Avenue will have a dramatic new structure to rival Disney Hall. Eli and Edythe Broad and architect Elizabeth Diller have revealed the long-awaited designs for The Broad Art Foundation's contemporary art museum. The three-story museum by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the same firm behind Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, has an intriguing porous honeycomb "veil" that wraps around the building.
The museum, which will simply be known as The Broad will showcase art drawn from the 2,000-piece Broad art collection as well as serving as the foundation's worldwide art lending library. The Broads are paying for the structure which will cost around $100 million and are funding the museum with a $200 million endowment.
Because the museum has two key missions, both serving as a public space and as an art archive it has some key structures called "the veil and the vault." The museum has almost an acre of column-free gallery space with a lecture hall for up to 200 people, a ground floor multimedia gallery, a lobby with display space and a museum shop. The archive, study and art storage space will be available to scholars and curators who want to research works in the collection or borrow artworks for their institutions. The "vault" has a carved underside hat shapes the lobby below and its top surface is the floor of the exhibition space. On all sides it is surround by the "veil" an airy, cellular structure that filters the abundant California sun. Some have compared the veil's design to the look of tripe.
The Broads also announced a 12-person board of governors who will oversee The Broad who are a who's who of some of Los Angeles' most recognizable citizens including William J. Bell, president of Bell-Phillip T.V. Productions, Inc.; Irving Blum, art collector; Deborah Borda, president and CEO of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association; Michael Chow, owner of Mr. Chow Enterprises Ltd.; Paul Frimmer, counsel with Loeb & Loeb LLP; Howard Marks, chairman of Oaktree Capital Management; Cindy Quane, senior financial advisor to The Broad Foundations; Robert H. Tuttle, former U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James's; and Jay Wintrob, president and CEO of SunAmerica Financial Group. Although the museum won't open for two years, the inaugural exhibition has already been announced. It will showcase 200 of the most iconic works from the Broad Collections. After the inaugural exhibition, The Broad will feature rotating exhibitions every four months.
