by Steven Carver
In the late 1990s, prominent architects became celebrities in their own right with their designs. It was the rise of starchitecture. These showpieces – like Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain – attracted visitors to the venue, as well as revitalizing surrounding neighborhoods. Everyone was a winner by proxy. Soon enough, the process of sourcing an architect who could create a striking edifice became a game of one-upmanship. From the surreal glass curves set in a concrete box of the Salvador Dali Museum (located in St. Petersburg, Florida and designed by HOK) to the graceful, undulating waves of the Heydar Aliyev Center (situated in Baku, Azerbaijan and designed by Zaha Hadid); these buildings became architectural icons. No longer was the art housed inside of museums the main focus, but the museums assumed an alternate form of sculptural works of art. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler, The Broad is the first entirely new major museum founded in Los Angeles in almost 20 years. Given a blank canvas to work from, the contemporary art museum
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moves beyond the constructs of traditional buildings with a design that not only changes the face of the city’s gentrifying downtown landscape, but also assimilates it into its environment. Founded by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad, the museum is home to the 2,000-work Broad collection and showcases some of the most prominent works of postwar and contemporary art worldwide – including pieces from influential contemporary artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cy Twombly, Ed Ruscha, Jeff Koons, Jasper Johns, Cindy Sherman, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, and more – and makes its collection accessible to the widest possible audience by presenting exhibitions and operating a lending program to art museums and galleries worldwide (over 8,000 to approx 500 museums). issue #155
Creating a flow between public and private space, DS+R designed the “the veil and the vault” as a 120,000-square-foot building that merges the two key components of a museum: two floors of gallery space (50,000 square feet) and collection storage. The “vault” hovers midway in the building, always in view. With the underside shaping the lobby below and the top surface becoming the floor of the exhibition space above, the core stores portions of the collection not currently displayed or loaned out (windows are provided so visitors can peek at the expansive space beyond the galleries). Enveloping the “vault” is the “veil”: a honeycomb-like grid that wraps around the blocklong gallery and provides filtered, natural daylight. 8