The Broad
This paper was written in 2016 for the discipline "Collecting Architecture Territories," instructed by Mark Wasiuta, as part of my master's degree in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture at Columbia University in New York.
Excerpt:
At first sight, the museum looks like a translucent white box of monumental proportions bounded by streets. What may be a singular icon in the urban landscape is also a complex structure of spaces of exhibition and management with orchestrated moments of revelation and connections between inside and outside, cover and exposure. One could also describe the museum as a black box, the “vault,” inside a white one, “the veil,” however, the black box is as porous as the white one, both with specific openings. The tension between these contrasting elements is permanent and not solved by physical experience only; it depends on reflections about the strategies of the openings.
Understanding the notions of the “vault” and the “veil,” as well as the moments of their inversion, is then essential to the examination not only of the building but also of the character of the institution.
The “vault” places the collection’s storage as the central element of the museum and takes it out of complete invisibility - it occupies the second floor of the museum together with the museum’s office and the auditorium. Its virtual knowledge is transformed into a visual experience via two transparent glass windows opened on different levels of the museum’s central stairs. Coherent to the firm’s continuous challenges of "spatial conventions of the every day," Diller Scofidio + Renfro reversed then the usual logic of museums, which highlights exhibition spaces concealing storage and management areas from the visitor’s experience.
The “veil” is not only responsible for the first image we have of the museum and its photographic identity but is also the surface that allows and rejects the dialogue between interior and exterior, controlling moments of transparency and opacity to the outside and creating psychological effects of curiosity and desire.
The building occupies a site on Grand Avenue, on the corner of 2nd Avenue and S Hope Street. Grand Avenue was not a strange place for Eli Broad due to his involvement in the fund-raising for MOCA in the 1970s and for the construction of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in the 1990s. During the construction of the latter, Eli Broad articulated the creation of a project for the development of Grand Avenue and became the chairman of its committee. In 2007, Grand Avenue Authority, “an entity that enabled four city and county officials to make decisions about the project and also to delegate responsibility to a committee chaired by Broad,” was created. As a consequence of a financial crisis that affected the economy of the whole country, the project had interruptions and has not been completed yet.
“According to the plan, Grand Avenue would be transformed from a lifeless, freeway-bound thoroughfare into a cultural corridor, anchored by Disney Hall and featuring a luxury hotel, condominiums, restaurants, stores, and a sixteen-acre park. Related signed the deal, worth three billion dollars, in March 2007.”
It is not clear how the site of the museum became the Broad’s property, but the position of the Broad in Grand Avenue is relevant and desires attention. The area of Grand Avenue in question is considered nowadays an important cultural hub with institutions and schools of visual arts, music and dance. The addition of The Broad in Grand Avenue can be seen as a twofold gain both for Mr. Broad, as it is situated in an already developed area for cultural activities with enough infrastructure to support the museum activities, and for the avenue’s project due to the reinforcement of the region’s cultural character and confidence/reassurance for investments.
In addition, the Grand Avenue Project is not an isolated case. The whole Downtown area has been in development. Demolitions and new buildings for hotels, retail spaces, and residential buildings—including various boards indicating luxury apartments—as well as the expansions of the subway network can be seen in a brief passage in the area.
The same movement can also be observed in the art district, located in the east portion of Downtown, close to the LA River. In the middle of former factories and warehouses, it is possible to find stylish cafes, restaurants, boutiques, and the renovation of large spaces like a former mill complex turned into the newly opened Hauser and Wirth, characterized as a “dynamic multi-disciplinary arts center” with exhibition and outdoor areas and a garden. Its new space offers a museum-like program challenging the commercial character of a traditional gallery.
This can be seen then as a is symptomatic example of the current reshape of the art market that has been in development since the 1990s with the enlargement of the system and the growth of private museums. The major concern in this context is how it blurs the boundaries between the different types of institutions of the system that includes public museums.
Back to The Broad’s building, it is interesting to notice how it arranges functions occupying the site as a whole and establishing connections among the parts. The restaurant, garden and outdoor plaza are disconnected to the volume of the museum, but a continuation among the spaces is planned expressing the intention of the project to create a more fluid flow in the city.
In this regard, the spaces of transition and passage are essential to The Broad’s visit—from outside to inside and into the inside. They compose the experience of the museum and are generated in a logic of flow and circuit. The complete experience is then dependent on these various moments.
The ground open space for public access is a common typology in the region. In buildings of different programs—offices, banks, hotels—these areas establish a pedestrian net of circulation, multiplying the walking passages and softening the conflict between cars and pedestrians in a city where the latter is usually at a disadvantage.
The relevance of the pedestrian is also expressed in the argued welcome of the passerby represented by the plaza, which continues from the exterior to the interior of the museum emulating the absorption of the street. To be welcoming is an important concept for the project in the architectural and institutional discourses and is expressed in a set of strategies. One of them is the maintenance of the ground floor on the same level as the sidewalk, such as proposed by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone for the project of MoMA in 1939, as an attempt to create a more fluid relationship between outside and inside and invite people to enter the museum.
“This notion of creating a museum that was both popular and populist in spirit led the institution to break away from the prevailing architectural language used for museums at the time—a language heavily reliant on classical and neoclassical references—and to adopt the vocabulary of international modernism. It also led the Museum to place its entrance directly on the street, instead of up the imposing flight of stairs used by many other museums to set themselves apart from urban activity and noise. In doing so, the Museum radically altered its relationship with the public and with the city, declaring that it was to be understood not as a quiet sanctuary but as part of the hectic and ever-changing life of its metropolitan setting.”
Another procedure was the lift of the veil in the corners of Grand Avenue to create the entrance and exit doors. The movement is also extended to the front establishing a shadowed passage and a second layer for an entire transparent-glass façade allowing the passerby to visually penetrate the museum. However, what he is able to see is the inner plaza with a few sculptures and the curved dark walls of the “vault.” By receiving so little information, the visitor is expected to have feelings of curiosity and desire.
“The modern-day icon must combine its capacity to attract, focusing our attention and adoration, with the act of occlusion that lets us know there is something important about it, forcing us to participate in a ritual to unlock its meaning, and causing us to return again because that meaning is never fully comprehensible or consumable.”
At the same time that the person outside sees who is inside, they become aware of their condition not only as a viewer but as the object of another’s view. A mixed feeling of expectation, desire, and awareness of surveillance takes then the outsider. In this sense, the glass panels not only establish a visual continuation of outer and inner spaces but perform as an instrument of visual communication.
“Such projects led DS+R to consider the uses and abuses of architectural transparency. Historically, glass worked to dematerialize the traditional wall and so to expose the hidden interior of buildings, and many architects have associated this disclosure not only with professional honesty but with democratic openness. DS+R are rightly skeptical of this shaky analogy; the technology of glass has also proved useful for purposes of surveillance by corporations and governments alike, and this use, DS+R asserts, "spawned new paranoias." Yet this is only the first transvaluation of transparency; in our exhibitionistic culture, they claim, it is followed by a second, as "the fear of being watched has transformed into the fear that no one is watching." And with this change has come another: "Once considered invasive, electronic surveillance is now the accepted social contract in public space, a welcome assurance of security, and a performance vehicle."
