DS+R Expands DS+R's Broad

The Broad opened at the corner of Grand Avenue and 2nd Street, across the street from Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall, in September 2015, five years after the office of Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio, Charles Renfro and Benjamin Gilmartin won a competition to design it. Diller was the design lead for the “veil and vault” concept: the veil referring to the 2,500 glass-fiber reinforced concrete (GFRC) panels wrapping all four sides of the museum, and the vault being the storage for the museum's permanent collection, sitting in the middle of the building between the lobby at grade and the gallery beneath a roof of skylights.

Yesterday's announcement was made by Joanne Heyler, founding director of The Broad, who said in a statement: “In the brief period since 2015, our building has become an icon in Los Angeles’s cultural and civic landscape,” having welcomed more than 5.5 million visitors to date. She continued: “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 honor 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.”

Businessman and philanthropist Eli Broad, who died in 2021, amassed a collection of more than 2,000 artworks with his wife Edyth, leading to the erection of a museum dedicated to its storage and public display. (The storage vault also helps facilitate the lending library of the The Broad Art Foundation.) Edyth Broad said in the statement that “it is time to set the museum on course for the future. 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 Broad's expansion will be situated directly west of the existing museum, atop a parking plinth that is 1.5 floors above Hope Street, which the expansion faces as seen in the rendering at top. (See the existing conditions in Google Maps.) The plinth is directly connected to the recently completely Grand Ave Arts/Bunker Hill Metro station via a bridge spanning Hope, further making the site a logical one for the expansion. 

The rendering above shows the elevated plaza immediately south of The Broad, looking west toward the expansion. Diller's design for the expansion clearly aligns itself to the 2015 museum at the roof and the “lifted” veil, but formally it is departure: inverting the visual vocabulary of the “veil” for a smooth and solid sculptural mass with selective openings indented into or projecting from it. DS+R conceptualizes it as an “unveiling” of the vault that occupies the center of their earlier building.

The expansion, set to start construction before The Broad turns ten next fall, offers these elements:

• 55,000 square feet of new construction increasing the galleries by 70%
• Two open-air courtyards at the top of the building
• A flexible live-programming space
• A new experience of the popular art storage vault

The expansion is set to open ahead of LA hosting the 2028 Summer Olympics. The museum will stay open during construction and, as before, general admission to the museum will continue to be free after the expansion opens.