The Broad 221, Los Ángeles

About

When the most prominent philanthropist and art collector in Los Angeles hires the hottest architects in New York to design a museum to go up next to Los Angeles’s most famous recent building, people are going to pay attention. That, of course, is part of the purpose of The Broad, the long-awaited museum commissioned by Eli Broad, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and positioned right beside Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. It opened to the public in September2015, and I don’t think people in L.A. have talked about a museum this much since the Getty opened almost twenty years ago. The two museums make a striking contrast, and not only because the billionaire who funded the Getty, J. Paul Getty, had nothing whatsoever to do with its planning (he left the funds in his will), and Eli Broad and his wife, Edythe, are still very much around. The Getty is located on a hilltop site in Brentwood, miles from downtown Los Angeles, and has been widely criticized for being aloof and distant. Why couldn’t it be downtown, and look and feel accessible? Broad located his museum as if to respond to the Getty’s hauteur: it is right on Grand Avenue downtown, and you can actually walk past it and decide to go in.

Sources

• Arquitectura Viva