MIXING MOODS
Diller Scofidio + Renfro call the building they concocted for The Broad in downtown Los Angeles The Veil and the Vault. A better nickname might be The Worm in the Box. This museum opened in 2015 to house the contemporary art collection of Eli and Edyth Broad. It’s a three-story concrete block with, at the center, a knot of dark, narrow passages enclosing the escalator and stairs. The building’s functional spaces – offices, archives,
restrooms and mechanical rooms – are packed on the second floor. At the stair landing
here there’s a window into the vault, where hundreds of canvases are
hung, as if asleep, on metal racks. The main gallery is on the top floor, where daylight falls through sculpted ceiling coffers.
The veil is the building’s exterior screen of lozenge-shaped concrete panels. Each one is the size of a car door, with an opening at the center the size of a basketball. Along the front facade, on Grand Avenue, these panels are suspended, dramatically, six feet off the building’s glazing. One enters through the corners here, where the panels have been sliced away. There’s nothing veil-like about this outer shell. It’s a stark, brutalist element that allows only pinched views of the outside (especially north, looking to Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall) and virtually nothing of the inside. From the sidewalk below or across the street, the building’s inner organization remains a mystery.
The parametric geometry of the concrete panels give The Broad a slick contemporary sheen. But its interior staircase feels neolithic, a rupture through layers of geological time. Its low, dark, rounded passages, finished in smooth concrete, have the contours of a cave dug by hand. The stair folds back on itself at a pinched angle on the second floor, as if its route hadn’t been plotted beforehand. The contrast between the building’s clotted, intestine-like passages and its hyper-modern shell give it an energy and tension that’s missing from the bloated contemporary artworks inside. At its heart are two very different tempers.
Photograph by Iwan Baan. Courtesy of The Broad and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.