Broad Contemporary Art Museum, Lacma

By Lucy Bullivant - 7 January 2010

The new Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) designed by Renzo Piano opened in February this year. Made possible by a 60 million dollar donation from Eli and Edythe Broad, it enables LACMA, the largest art museum in the western United States, to expand its contemporary art programme, but has divided visitors on its merits. LACMA initially commissioned studies from leading architects in 2001, including Rem Koolhaas. He proposed tearing down all the existing buildings, apart from the Pavilion for Japanese Art and LACMA West, and replacing them with a bold warehouse style structure with a translucent roof. LACMA opted for the more affordable solution of adding new buildings that are clearly sited, and tearing out the road as Piano proposed.
It was Eli Broad who, as patron, took on a client role and agreed to a larger role for Piano. The architect had very early on identified the need for a masterplan to clarify a messy, 20 acre, campus including a park enclosing the La Brea tar pits to the east. “It’s very frustrating to play a good piece by a string quartet in the middle of three badly played rock concerts”, he wrote in a letter to Broad.
The Broad Contemporary Art Museum, which took just over two years to build, is part of the campus’s completed Phase 1, with improved circulation, a new entrance plaza and adaptations to the older Ahmanson Building to the east side of the campus, which was not noted for its innovative architecture. The buildings at LACMA East are boxy Beaux Arts designs remodelled a few times since they were built in 1965. Michael Govan, the Director of LACMA, who arrived in his post in 2006 from a highly successful period leading the DIA Foundation in New York and played a hand in the commissioning process, observed that Piano’s design has made the museum itself the canvas. It is also work in progress in an ongoing metamorphosis of this leading US cultural institution. Piano’s next step is a second...