In honour of its tenth anniversary, The Broad, a museum located in downtown Los Angeles that was established in 2015 by the late collector Eli Broad and his wife Edythe, is set to begin a $100 million extension project that will add 55,000 square feet to the facility.
The new building will be designed by the architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), who created the museum’s original building with its strikingly patterned facade, dramatic internal spaces, and exposed storage.
The museum’s gallery spaces will rise by 70% with the construction of the new building, which will also add new features including two outdoor courtyards on the top floor for public programming and live events, and a visible storage area with rotating displays of paintings on racks.
One of the covered public plazas serving the closest metro station is located in the external areas of the new wing. The new building’s construction is scheduled to start the following year and be finished by the time Los Angeles hosts the summer Olympics in 2028. The current museum structure will be open for business as usual.
“The Broad museum has exceeded the expectations I shared with my late husband Eli, and it is time to set the museum on course for the future,” Edythe Broad said in a statement. “The design for our expansion by Elizabeth Diller and DS+R creates new, beautiful spaces for art while preserving what already makes a visit to The Broad so special. I can’t imagine anyone else doing as good a job or caring quite as much.”
The new building’s designs depict an elevated structure with a smooth, slick surface that is broken up by a number of huge windows that resemble apertures. A statement stated that the façade of the new structure will mirror the old building’s core, which is composed of a sequence of circular, climbing forms that enclose sections like the museum’s storage areas and occasionally resemble the interior of caves. Since Eli Broad’s passing in 2021, the museum’s collection has added more than 2,000 pieces, with the help of Edythe, his wife, and Joanne Heyler, the director of the institution.
“In the brief period since 2015, our building has become an icon in Los Angeles’s cultural and civic landscape,” Heyler said in a statement. “With this expansion, we intend to amplify The Broad’s commitment to access for all to contemporary art, offering surprising, welcoming and imaginative experiences that honour the diversity of our public and add to the ever-growing vitality of Grand Avenue, the area that Eli Broad believed in so strongly and that he helped transform into what it is today.”
The announcement regarding the new extension states that since its opening, more than 5.5 million people have visited. As per the latest report on museum attendance counts worldwide by The Art Newspaper, The Broad ranked 79th globally in 2023 with 895,949 visits, indicating a 40% rise from 2022.
Eli Broad’s 2019 piece in The Los Angeles Times details how the Broads donated $500 million to build their eponymous museum and establish an endowment for it. The $1 billion Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is being built in the city’s Exposition Park, and the contentious new $750 million building being constructed by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will make The Broad’s expansion project the third major construction site at an institution in Los Angeles. While the latter is anticipated to open in 2025, the former’s construction is scheduled to be finished by the end of current year.
ART NEWSPAPER
