The new Broad and BCAM: Where have we seen that before?

Now that architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro have unveiled the design for the Broad, the new Grand Avenue building in downtown Los Angeles for the Broad Art Foundation's collection and the personal art holdings of philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad, comparisons are being drawn. Blogger William Poundstone has several of the more interesting ones, focused on the Broad Contemporary Art Museum building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. BCAM, designed by architect Renzo Piano, opened in 2008.

Perhaps the urge to compare was fueled by Elizabeth Diller's opening remarks at Thursday's news conference to showcase the new design. After effusive praise for architect Frank Gehry, seated up front and whose Disney Concert Hall stands adjacent to the new Broad, Diller said her firm had decided it "could not compete" with the iconic hall. (Who knew that congenial urban design was a competition?) So, Diller said the decision was made to go in the opposite direction.

Up came a remarkable image on the big projection screen showing what she meant.

Superimposed over a close-up detail of Gehry's Disney Hall (where the news conference was taking place) were the words "shiny" and "flat," a reference to the silver metal cladding on the building's famously curved, sail-like outer walls. Superimposed on DS+R's Broad, represented by a close-up of some sort of perforated beige material, were the contrasting words "matte" and "porous."

Some eyebrows in the room shot up. Was this reductive word game a "competitive" diss of Gehry's signature style as creating glittery, shallow baubles --shiny and flat -- perhaps suitable for an earlier era, but now to be followed by a sober, intellectually driven conceptual transparency? DS+R has built little, but the firm is known for approaching design less as a matter of shaping physical space and more as a conceptual art.

But back to BCAM. Perhaps the most remarkable comparison that emerged from the presentation is the new museum design's backward look to that recent predecessor.

The new Broad design features a one-way escalator up to a big, column-free, skylighted third-floor gallery, not well-suited for light-sensitive art objects, with free-standing walls and a meandering staircase leading visitors back down to ground level. BCAM features a one-way escalator up to a big, column-free, skylighted third-floor gallery, not well-suited for light-sensitive art objects, with free-standing walls and a meandering staircase leading visitors back down to ground level.

There are plenty of obvious differences between the two buildings, of course, including two additional art exhibition floors at BCAM and cast-concrete cladding for the Broad rather than traditional stone. But the similarity in plan is startling; perhaps it speaks to the client's unchanging interests from one art museum project to the next.

Competition, it turns out, can be a funny thing.

-- Christopher Knight

 @twitter.com/KnightLAT

 Photo (top): A cross-section of the Broad design showing the up escalator and staircase. Credit: Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Photo (bottom): The BCAM up escalator and staircase. Credit: Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times

RELATED

Animated fly-through of DS+R design for Broad building

The grand plan for the Broad museum

Critic's notebook: Broad museum design pointed in the right direction

More images of DSR's design for the Broad museum

 

Comments

[dean]

Gee, isn't it odd that art museum floor plans tend to look a lot alike? Hmmm. But better large open spaces that can be adjusted to meet different shows than the rabbit warren to tiny rooms that MOMA is. I'm not a fan of Piano's LACMA buildings but they're a lot better than what's next door. And, I believe Ms Diller remarked that their design was a beginning. And you know -- we all know -- that what Broad wants, Broad gets. I think you were perhaps a bit snarky and premature in your comment. Me, I will wait until there's a finished work.

[Troy]

That first rendering certainly does look familiar. I think this uses the same plan as the Dupont Chemical Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair. But with some of the 7-Up Pavilion and IBM Pavilion thrown in, particularly around the base.

Or maybe the General Motors Pavilion at Expo '86 up in Vancouver?

It's kind of a mish-mash of every 20th century kitschy World's Fair pavilion ever built. Maybe LACMA could get Disney to write the catchy theme song for it too?

[harry bowers]

When is somebody going to say "The king has no new clothes". How sad for LA. I was born there and I love it. This will be a laughing stock building. Really really sad. The negative observations for this future Target Superstore are all right on. Just cause you have money doesn't mean you have an educated point of view. sad sad sad. Step up to the plate art people!

[contraryjim]

Poor Eli, too much money, too much time on his hands. He should have stopped with the restrained Ed G Stone office building in WLA

[Donald Frazell]

Bigger is not better. It actually is compensation, just like teenagers driving Firebirds back in the day. And why contemporary art is so large, it is meaningless outside of sterile cavernous environments, which make real art look like postage stamps, even Monet. Where is the color? The form? the utilization of the visual language? Too difficult and time consuming, always easier to go big wiht teh obvious and pawn it off as something new. Being new isnt the point, being good and relevant to all of humanity is. If you are true and observant of life, it will feel new and alive, but that has been brainwahsed out of artistes these days, who seldom leave the soft and cushy environs of the childish artscene and daycare centers of the academies. .
Another Mausoleum to Ego. A tombstone, with all the passion and vitality to match inside. Probably great for parties though. Can meet and go over to the Disney, another colorless, souless lifeless monstrosity of Ego in our time of Excess and Meism. Truly Imperial Clothing. At least the Disney is interesting as sculpture, just not what a building is supposed to be, about what is inside, and the lives of the people who are there and invited in. These places are for an inbred "elite". Who wish to distance themsaelvs from the "riffraff" goal achieved. Flush.

Save the spiritual and truly creative Watts Towers, tear down these sterile Ivories of Ego.

[eahostudio]

Mr. Broad: put all your money - and paintings - in one (good) basket please.

[Ken C. Arnold]

In an era when so much of what is called important architecture seems gimicky and forced I find the design of the Broad Musuem to be spot on and masterful. The trick is coming up with a design that is highly useful or functional, intellectually stimulating, historic and beautiful all at the same time. The Broad seems almost welcoming and friendly when compared to Disney Hall up the street which as much as I have come to appreciate it's strange novelity and slick configuration still seems rather forbodding and standoffish as well as upfront and plunked down in the middle of nowhere. Ken C. Arnold Santa Monica, Ca

[Scott]

Snarky comments here as usual. I'm not a big fan of the BCAM, but at least I'm reserving my opinion until I actually see this building.

The first thing that came to mind is the Seattle Library, maybe because that also is a cross-hatched structural frame draped over a concrete interior, creating an airy, sky-lit third floor over a concrete "box" in the middle (though I trust the Broad's won't be lipstick red) and an open ground floor.

I liked the Seattle Library though I heard mixed opinions of how it actually functions as a library. It'll be interesting how this building turns out in that regard as a museum.

[Donald Frazell]

Who the hell uses the word snarky? Are Dean and scott twins or graduates at the same art conceptual art school?

I like teh pigeon coop concept i heard earlier, this will be heaven for our friends the sky rats, Guano City..

Storm the Bastilles of empty headed cleverness. Is Smarky the guard dog? Proably a poodle just like the students who will be the only ones who go here, just like MoCA, until the patron partiers show.

[John Medici]

If architecture is "frozen music" then the new design for the Broad collection on Grand Avenue is the music of a junior high marching band in rehearsal: one big, loud, thump of a sound. Mr Broad would do better to invest his millions in a trust that would insure the art is seen by as many as possible, for free. Why not renovate an existing older building, thus preserve more valued architecture, instead of competing with Disney Hall in being the most outrageous piece of post modernism? Use the money to help teach art, to bring art to children through traveling shows, to foster new artists? My Renaissance namesakes never built a museum with their name above; instead they placed art in existing or new palaces and finally left it all to the people of Florence. Mr Broad can learn a lot from the Medici, and perhaps then his name will truly mean something in the future. John Medici, Burbank

[Scott]

Nope, never went near an art school, sorry. Just offering my honest opinion that relates to Mr. Knight's original point, that's all.