The Broad was designed by the New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, with Gensler as architect of record, and opened in 2015. It is a contemporary art museum on Grand Avenue, immediately adjacent to Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall, and it houses the collection of Eli and Edythe Broad, comprising approximately 2,000 works of post-war and contemporary art.
The conceptual armature of the building is the relationship between two distinct elements that the architects have named the veil and the vault. The vault is a solid mass of poured concrete in the centre of the building, occupying the second floor and serving as the climate-controlled storage core for the collection, which is publicly visible through internal apertures. The veil is the porous outer envelope wrapping the vault on all four sides, lifted from the ground at the entrance to draw visitors in, and rising above the vault to admit diffuse daylight to the top-floor gallery. The veil is composed of 2,500 unique panels of glass-fibre-reinforced concrete, each cast with diamond-shaped perforations that taper toward the edges of the building, where the openings widen to admit more light. The panels are supported on a secondary steel frame attached to the underlying primary steel structure. At ground level the visitor enters beneath the lifted veil, passes the exposed concrete mass of the vault, and is carried by an escalator that tunnels diagonally through the vault to the column-free third-floor gallery above. Here the perforations of the veil admit a soft, evenly distributed northern daylight, calibrated to avoid direct sun on the artworks below. The plan is approximately fifty-three by ninety-three metres, three storeys, with the lower two storeys mostly occupied by the vault, lobby, and back-of-house, and the entirety of the third floor given to a single 35,000-square-foot gallery.
The Broad demonstrates how a contemporary museum can make the relationship between its two functions, exhibition and storage, into the principal architectural argument of the building. It also exemplifies the integration of digital fabrication into design at every scale, from the geometry of the perforated veil down to the casting of each individual panel.