The Broad museum in Los Angeles broke ground Wednesday (9 April) on its $100m, 550,000 sq. ft expansion project, which will increase its gallery space by 70%. Designed by the architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), which created the museum’s original building in 2015, the expansion is scheduled to open in 2028—just in time for the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
The expansion “opens a new perspective on the ‘veil and vault’ concept DS+R introduced in 2015”, according to the project’s press release, with the building’s patterned “honeycomb ‘veil’ enveloping the art storage ‘vault’, its sculptural grey core. The expansion symbolically pulls the vault out from the veil and opens it to the public, reinforcing the Broad’s mission and track record of reaching the widest possible audience.” This will include new outdoor and dedicated event spaces, as well as a new art-storage facility open to the public.
“I consider these buildings to be siblings, not clones,” the architect Elizabeth Diller said in a statement, “with a shared DNA but expressing unique characteristics that enhance the visitor’s experience of the pair. By turning the vault inside out, the expansion will present new ways for visitors to directly engage with the art in smaller, more focused galleries or through serendipitous encounters with art in storage while preserving the intuitive logic of the original museum.”
The Broad was founded by its namesake, the real estate development and insurance billionaire Eli Broad (1933-2021) and his wife Edythe L. Broad. Its collection of more than 2,000 pieces made since 1950 acts as a kind of introduction to contemporary art with works by all the major players—Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, Yayoi Kusama, Roy Lichtenstein, Takashi Murakami, Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker and Andy Warhol among them.
In its press release about the groundbreaking, the museum boasted the “highest single-day attendance in its history” last month, with more than 6,800 people visiting. According to The Art Newspaper’s annual Visitor Figures report, the Broad welcomed 846,500 total visitors in 2024—6% less than the previous year.
