The Broad museum in Los Angeles reveals $100m expansion plans

The Broad, the museum in downtown Los Angeles founded in 2015 by the late collector Eli Broad and his wife Edythe, will mark its first decade by embarking on a $100m expansion that will add 55,000 sq. ft to the institution. The museum has enlisted the architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), which designed its existing building—with its distinctive patterned exterior, dramatic interior spaces and visible storage—to create the new structure.

The new building will increase the museum’s gallery spaces by 70%, as well as creating new amenities like a space for live events and public programming, two top-level outdoor courtyards and a new visible storage room featuring rotating displays of paintings on racks. The new wing’s exterior spaces include a covered public plaza for the nearest metro station. Construction on the new building will begin next year and is due to be complete by the time Los Angeles hosts the summer Olympic Games in 2028. The museum’s existing building will remain open throughout.

“The Broad museum has exceeded the expectations I shared with my late husband Eli, and it is time to set the museum on course for the future,” Edythe Broad said in a statement. “The design for our expansion by Elizabeth Diller and DS+R creates new, beautiful spaces for art while preserving what already makes a visit to The Broad so special. I can’t imagine anyone else doing as good a job or caring quite as much.”

Designs for the new building show a raised structure with a sleek, smooth exterior punctuated by several large, aperture-like windows. According to an announcement, the new building’s exterior is intended to echo the core of the existing building, which features a series of ascending, rounded forms that at times evokes the inside of a cave and encloses spaces such as the museum’s storage facilities. The museum’s collection numbers more than 2,000 works and has continued to grow since Eli Broad’s death in 2021 under the guidance of his widow, Edythe, and the museum’s director, Joanne Heyler.

“In the brief period since 2015, our building has become an icon in Los Angeles’s cultural and civic landscape,” Heyler said in a statement. “With this expansion, we intend to amplify The Broad’s commitment to access for all to contemporary art, offering surprising, welcoming and imaginative experiences that honour the diversity of our public and add to the ever-growing vitality of Grand Avenue, the area that Eli Broad believed in so strongly and that he helped transform into what it is today.”

According to the announcement about the new expansion, it has welcomed more than 5.5 million visitors since it opened. According to The Art Newspaper’s most recent report on global museum visitor numbers, The Broad was the world’s 79th most-visited museum in 2023, with 895,949 visitors—a 40% increase from 2022.

The Broads gave $500m to build their namesake museum and create an endowment for it, according to an essay by Eli Broad published by The Los Angeles Times in 2019. The Broad’s expansion project will make it the third major construction site at a Los Angeles institution: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is in the midst of building a controversial new $750m building and the $1bn Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is under construction in the city’s Exposition Park. Construction of the former is due to be complete by the end of this year; the latter is expected to open in 2025.