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New Broad in Town

New Broad in Town

Last month AN reported on philanthropist Eli Broad’s new plan for a museum in Beverly Hills, on the western edge of Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards. If approved, the five-story building would contain 118,500 square feet of office space on four levels and 68,000 square feet of museum gallery space, archives, and street-level retail.

Now AN has learned from a source that the shortlist for an invited competition to design the museum includes Thom Mayne, Jean Nouvel, Shigeru Ban, Rafael Viñoly, and Christian de Portzamparc. The architects will present schemes in mid-February. Advisors to the competition include Frank Gehry, long associated with various Broad undertakings; critic Joseph Giovannini; Joanne Heyler (Director/Chief Curator for the Broad Foundation), and Marcy Goodwin (museum planning consultant).

The new project would become the permanent home for the Broad Collections, with over 2,000 artworks, and would also house a research and study center, as well as the Broad Art Foundation’s administrative headquarters. The foundation currently uses a building in Santa Monica for offices and a gallery, which is only open by appointment.

Gensler, which was Executive Architect of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM), has been consulting on the project for the last few months to help devise programming and conceptual design. The firm confirmed that if approved, the new project would be located on one or two parcels of a three-parcel site at the intersection of Santa Monica and Wilshire boulevards currently reserved for commercial and retail development and known as “The Gateway.” The long, linear building would have an unobstructed floor plate and mediate between the busy nature of Santa Monica Boulevard and the pedestrian-oriented Little Santa Monica Boulevard.

Broad, recently in the news for bailing out the ailing Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) to the tune of $15 million, only just cut the ribbon on the $56 million Renzo Piano–designed Broad Contemporary Art Museum at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—also on Wilshire Boulevard—last year. The Broad foundation could not be reached for further comment on the project.


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