The vault abides.
That might be the quickest way to summarize plans by Diller Scofidio + Renfro to extend the firm’s own Broad museum in downtown Los Angeles. DS+R’s design for the original building, which opened in 2015, tucked the museum’s archival collection inside walls of gray Venetian plaster and sandwiched that room—which it labeled “the vault”—between a vast gallery on the third floor and a street-level lobby. Then the architects wrapped the whole stack inside a scored and largely windowless skin of GFRC panels meant to look like (and originally meant to be) cast concrete; this was “the veil,” a photogenic if forbidding sort of brise-soleil through which no breeze could blow. I always found the metaphors a bit heavy-handed, but the public lapped them up, and the museum, which offers free admission, has been an unqualified hit in nearly every way. Attendance exceeded six million people in the Broad’s first decade of operation, far surpassing expectations, and the building has activated the sidewalks around it, along Grand Avenue at the top of Bunker Hill, to …