If you are a regular ArchDaily reader you know that we have been providing ongoing coverage of Eli Broad’s Broad Museum in Los Angeles. Nearly 120,000 sqf and $130 million dollars, invitations were given to six top architects to submit designs for the new museum. Rem Koolhaas, Herzog and de Meuron, Christian de Portzamparc, Ryue Nishizawa and Kazuyo Sejima, Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Foreign Office Architects competed and in August we informed you that Diller Scofidio + Renfro garnered the commission.
Today, the design for the Broad Museum has been released. Situated adjacent to Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall and Arata Isozaki’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the museum has become a key part of the Grand Avenue redevelopment project that has been losing steam.
The core of the design lies with in two large rectangular boxes. The foundation box serves as the parking garage and the upper box, or ‘vault’, contains the interior spaces for art storage, archives and office space for the Broad Art Foundation.
The vault, veil, and dimple are just some of the terms that have been used by the architects to refer to the different areas of their design. A dramatic facade of varying cast-concrete hexagonal shapes lifts at the corner of 2nd Street and Grand, near Disney Hall, creating the main entrance to Broad Museum. The veil, wrapping the gallery space on the third floor, the vault on the second floor and the lobby at ground level, is structural bearing the roof load and also serves as a sunshade for the building. The exterior skin will have varying thickness and transparency on its four facades, and it dimples on Grand Avenue taking the form of a sunken window.
Noticeably absent from the DS + R’s design is the dynamic interaction between car and pedestrian. Originally DS + R submitted a design that forced drivers descending into the parking garage and pedestrians coming in from Grand Avenue to face each other through glass, providing an unavoidable encounter between the current car culture lifestyle of LA and the movement towards mass transit. However, as Elizabeth Diller told Christopher Hawthorne, “the project isn’t over yet.”
For comparison take a minute to check out DS + R’s winning entry for the new Image and Audio Museum in Rio de Janeiro.
Source: Christopher Hawthorne for the LA Times
