Article > Yue Yang
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As one of the "Five Golden Flowers" building on Gran Blanche in downtown Los Angeles, the newly completed Broad Museum of Contemporary Art is like a white crown worn in the city. Its design highlights– the "canopy" and "dome" – also illustrate the two main functions that the museum offers: gallery space and collection storage.
With the recent opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, a new landmark has been added to Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. This contemporary art scene from the inside out was designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in New York.
Its appearance, along with the existing Japanese architect Isozaki's newly designed Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall, and Spanish architect Rafael Moneo's Design of the Church After The Angels, The Visual and Performing Arts Secondary School, designed by Wolf Prix, founder of the Blue Sky Group of the famous Austrian architectural firm, together form the "Five Golden Flowers" complex on Gran Vía, which is a beautiful landscape in the city. As Mr. Eli Broad, owner of the Broad Museum of Contemporary Art, puts it, "Museums are to be iconic local architectural works." I don't think you'll see five architectural works so impressive in any two connected neighborhoods in the world. ”
The design of Diller Skfidio Renfo Architects stood out five years ago through the design of the project. The firm has received awards including the American Institute of Architects President's Award, the American Institute of Architects Medal of Honor, the renovation and expansion of Lincoln Center in New York City, and the prestigious High Line Park in lower Manhattan. When Elie Brod announced the final partnership with Diller Skofidio Renfo Architects, it meant not only creating a large building that satisfies clients in terms of functionality, but also making the building a distinctive streetscape on Grand Vía, adding artistic charm to the city as a whole.
"Our hearts have landed on Gran Via in downtown Los Angeles." Elie Brod said, "This is a gift we have given to the city and it has always been wonderful for us. We want the great works of contemporary art to be displayed to the widest public, and there is no better place to put the museum in terms of where it was built than this capital, which is known as the center of contemporary art in the world. ”
In fact, Since the 1980s, Broad himself has been hoping that Grand Avenue will become the cultural center of Los Angeles. Previously, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, he said that the Broad Museum of Contemporary Art could help Los Angeles become an art center like New York, London and Paris. "If you add up the area of contemporary art exhibition halls at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I don't think the area of contemporary art in other cities around the world will be larger than here." Brod said.
In late September this year, the Broad Museum of Contemporary Art officially opened. In fact, the 11,000-square-meter museum was originally scheduled to open to the public in 2012, but had to be postponed due to the difficulty of construction of the building. When completed, the museum looks like a white crown worn in the city. The four facades are repeatedly arranged with wedge-shaped light-transmitting holes of uniform or similar shape, which look from a distance, like the surface of an enlarged vegetable scraper, or like a white bird's nest.
On the main façade, in the lower middle, an oval area is recessed inward and torn open, revealing the glass curtain wall behind it, which corresponds to the museum's conference room. Thus, the depression breaks the dull and monotonous repetitive architectural language. Against the backdrop of the blue sky, it is as if a piece of turquoise crystal is embedded in the building and becomes the finishing touch to the design of the main façade. The lighting of the museum, no doubt, is achieved through the countless regularly arranged wedge holes on the façade of the building, as well as the transparent glass curtain behind it. Passing by the museum from Broad Street, one can look past from a sloping angle that can reach multiple floors inside the museum. Such design and experience seems to indicate the public nature of this contemporary art museum itself, showing its openness and democracy.
Speaking at the museum's media launch in September, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti called the Broad Museum of Contemporary Art "a crown" in the city. Under the crown, the different themes and spiritual themes surrounding the Broad Collection will be staged in the form of public programmes including film, dialogue, performance and music, in which the creative processes and ideas of the artists are integrated.
Elizabeth Diller, one of the architects of the building, distilled the keywords "canopy" and "dome" in describing the design highlights of the Broad Museum of Contemporary Art.
"It's a three-story building with a piercing body and a clear view. A rectangular shell similar to a honeycomb pattern, made of pre-made building materials. The four corners of the entire shell near one end of the ground were cut off obliquely, leaving a shape like an upturned mouth. Diller depicted figuratively. Among them, the place after the diagonal cut in the southeast corner eventually became the entrance to the museum. It is such a stylized white shell that envelops and embellishes the glass curtain main structure of the Broad Museum of Contemporary Art, which Is considered a major design highlight by Diller. The relaxed design of the museum's "shroud" creates elegance, charm, atmosphere, and an alluring visual feel.
Entering the interior of the museum, visitors will pass through a narrow pipe to the top floor full of skylights, where the exhibition space is located. The elevator is set to rapid ascending mode, and that passage is reminiscent of the imitation genital duct in Matthew Barney's "Cremaster 4." Walking through Brod's collection is the "Dome", which is also the heart of the museum. In a sense, it is obviously very exciting and exciting, even if it will make many people feel a kind of teasing, because the exhibits in the dome are only open to scholars and students, while other audiences can only glimpse the fine works of these contemporary art fields through the glass curtain wall along the escalator with regret, and then have to drift away from the wonderful works of art, fading them out of the field of vision.
"It's a soul-sucking piece." Diller said with emotion, "The shape of the dome, and the design features of its interior, seem to be able to swallow you in." You either walk below, or weave through it, or wander on the top floor. That feeling, in Diller's words, is simply "going back and forth between the top art hall and the ground." "You (take the elevator) ascent very quickly, and the sculptural dome is right in front of you, and it's the real protagonist here, and then you reach the exhibition area." When you fall, [the elevator] is very slow again, passing through the artwork little by little, and then ending the whole tour. At this point, you can finally understand how that feeling came about. ”
As architectural languages, the "canopy" and "dome" are fused with the Broad Museum of Contemporary Art, while at the same time illustrating and dividing the museum's two major functions: gallery space and collection storage. Among them, the first floor of the museum can provide about 1393 square meters of exhibition space, while the third floor has about 3251 square meters of open space. Through the holes in the "outer canopy" and the glass curtain wall, the natural light filtered into the room outlines and illuminates the gallery area. As for the collection, The Broad Art Foundation has always supported its lending. To this end, the architects set up the collection space of the artwork in an important position in the design - a storage area for the collection was set up in the very center of the building. It is worth mentioning that in the opening exhibition of the Broad Museum of Contemporary Art, joanne Heyler, the founding director of the museum, curated a major exhibition that could make the audience shine. These include 10 works by Jeff Koons, including 1995's Tulips and 1994's Balloon Dog, which are displayed on the top floor of a light-filled museum. Also on the side are works by Roy Lichtenstein, Christopher Wool, Mark Bradford and others. Robert Therrien's giant dining table sculpture that fills the room became a hotspot for Instagram sharing. In addition, The Broad Foundation's recent collection of Yayoi Kusama's "House of Mirrors" also feasted the audience's eyes in the opening collection exhibition.
Still, people's first impressions of the museum are not all positive. In a New York Times report, art critic Holland Cotter argued that the painting- and sculpture-dominated institution was no more than just another "old-fashioned art gallery" of the New Gilded Age. Cotter argues that Broad is associated with Henry Clay Frick, J. Scott, and the Gilded Age of America. J.P. Morgan Morgan) in New York, the Morgan Library and Museum, among others— buildings that hope to leave traces in history are essentially the same. However, in the "New Gilded Age", private museums established by the rich tended to focus on emerging art. And the stories embodied in these arts have not yet become history, they are still in a state of flux.
To that end, Broad responded to that claim at a news conference shortly afterwards. "I don't think this museum is old-fashioned." Brod said, "We want to be different from the Frick Collection in New York and the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California." Frick's collection of European paintings and sculptures from the 19th to the 20th centuries is rich, while Norton Simon is known for his collection of European paintings and traditional East Asian art. These collections are inextricably linked to the artistic tastes of the Gilded Age. However, Brod said that compared to these private art galleries established in the last century, "we want the Broad Museum of Contemporary Art to be more dynamic and open." ■(Editor: Qian Zhu)