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 a degree I could never have predicted.
Now, in expanding the campus to the north, where it will occupy a vacant parcel above a parking structure—airspace where a hotel or office tower were earlier envisioned— DS+R is turning the original schema inside out. (Or, as the architects put it, “The exterior of the expansion echoes the surface appearance of the vault—as if this core had been exposed and ‘unveiled’—symbolically expressing The Broad’s commitment to access while playfully inverting the visual vocabulary of the current building.”) The addition, which will boost the Broad’s gallery space by 70 percent and is expected to open by 2028, in time for the Olympics, consists of a two-story form wrapped in the same seamless cetacean material that drapes the vault, or at least a version of it hardy enough for the out-of-doors. The whole hovers over a landscaped courtyard, which itself leads to a pedestrian bridge linked to a Metro subway station. Two additional open spaces, small courtyards open to the sky, are tucked away on the top floor of the addition. There is a narrow gap between new building and old, connected by a glazed walkway.
Though this last gesture will add a bit of drama, it’s also a concession to the fact that DS+R, because it was so certain that a nonmuseum building was going to rise to the north, gave the Broad a forbiddingly blank façade on that elevation. There’s very little to be done with that wall except leave it mostly as is. (As Diller told me in a recent conversation, the original Broad “was designed not to be added to.”) This means that the augmented museum will be, in essence, and inefficiently enough, a doubled version of the original, with two separate circulation systems and a pair of entry-level plazas—though the structures, with their very different physiognomies, will be more like siblings, or even cousins, than twins. This is the sort of architecture—the sort of benefit of the doubt, to put a finer point on it—that programmatic success can buy.