View of Lobby Entry at The Broad. Photo taken by Patrick Geske, 2019

The Broad is much more than a building, so to review it only as a physical object would be to fall for the decoy. The Broad is playing next-level games with art and real estate, in a similar way that Trump played next-level games with the media during his campaign. The benefit to The Broad’s games, of course, is that people can go see some beautiful art for free - or, more accurately, they can go see art at no cost to them, but which nevertheless is considerably subsidized by the City of Los Angeles. (More on that later.)

The Broad

Built: 2015
Architect: Diller Scofidio + Renfro
Executive Architect: Gensler
Location: 221 S. Grand Ave Los Angeles, CA 

Building Score: 5.7

Under the Skin is a new review series that focuses on buildings in Los Angeles. Each review selects one finished building, whether newly built or long-time-standing, and takes an in-depth look at it in order to get under its skin.

For the second installment, we take a visit to The Broad, now three years old, to look beyond the novelty of its opening.

Is it a Museum???

The Broad is an ambiguous name - is it a foundation? A building? A museum? What’s clear about it, at least to anyone who knows it’s not a film noir reference, is that it is a proper name. That name belongs to Edythe Broad, the art lover and collector, as well as her husband, Eli, who made vast sums of money as a suburban real estate developer, and large-scale life-insurance salesman. Their story can be found elsewhere. Relevant here is that “The Broad” is an entity associated with the building itself, but that exists beyond the bounds of the physical building. I’m curious about this entity in a sociological sense, including how it benefits from a parasitic relationship with LA. (Parasites, of course, can be beneficial)

Art Storage, Broadly

The ambiguity in “The Broad” as a name spills over into the experience of the building itself. With 20,000 more sq.ft. devoted to art storage than to galleries, the Broad is objectively more of a storage facility than it is a museum for display, defined by as much as what you don’t experience as what you do. What’s being stored here? Is it art? Or a bulky investment portfolio? Is it possible today to separate the aesthetic aspect from the speculative value of art?  

That, unfortunately, is above my pay grade. But I will speak to how the tension between aesthetics and speculation is manifested in the experience of The Broad itself, and what the effects of that tension are.

For this review, I enlisted a friend who was involved with some recent Museum Experiences in LA, along the lines of The Museum of Ice Cream. They helped provide useful insight into “The Broad Experience.”

The Broad Experience

Bathed in the gentle white glow of indirect light from the roof louvers, the upper gallery is sure to offer everyone something to love. A catalog of rich colors and textures, it happens to be a great setting for photos and the production of content. If the 2D, graphic quality of Lichtenstein isn’t “you,” I recommend the more contemporary flavor of a painter like Murakami. Or, try the darkness on for size of Robert Longo’s charcoal drawings (Untitled (Ferguson Police, August 13, 2014)). It all produces likable material. Plus, mounting likes and reposts only make the art more culturally relevant, and hence more valuable as a speculative investment. #koons

Everything drips and sparkles with money. Is this a curated show or a display of the crown jewels in a sparkling investment portfolio? Much of the work, seemingly connected by nothing more than vague contemporaneity and high value, is reduced to a brand on one hand, and on the other, to the objects’ physical characteristics. To be confronted from room to room by such strikingly different works can be an exhausting kind of aesthetic bombardment.

Or, treat it like the various rooms in a pop-up museum experience, and the gallery is activated as a stage for interactivity and performance: the high-art version of a museum experience. Regrettably, it is missing what every good museum experience needs though, which is some version of the sprinkle pool. Maybe they could get Ai Weiwei to adapt his Sunflower Seeds?

Honey, I Shrunk the People

If there was a theme to The Broad as a “museum experience,” it might be an austere, adult version of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids or its now-defunct playground at Disney World. The escalator to the third floor, I suppose, runs you through the Incredible Shrinking Machine, spitting you up into a land of monstrous images and forms. From the ceiling height to the huge partitions, the upper gallery is scaled-up to fit the tremendous sculptures and paintings. In this gigantic jewelry box, humans are the interlopers. The art will live on long after we’re gone and will be worth many times its current value (allegedly). From the multiple Koons sculptures to Robert Thierren’s Under the Table, the art continuously seeks a larger scale. Inevitably, this alludes to money - as in, the bigger it is, the more it’s worth - but also to more space. It’s almost as if, without becoming public art, the pieces want to exist at the scale of the city.

Totemic Art

If Roddy Piper could walk out of the movie They Live and into The Broad, what would he see, I wonder, with his sunglasses that reveal the hidden messages behind in everyday life?

Through a loosely sociological reading of The Broad, we can understand the over-sized artworks in the gallery as ornament at the urban scale. They are totems of development, of embodied real estate profit. When Kaufman & Broad, Eli’s home building company, started developing suburban houses, they did so with no frills, dispensing with basements and garages, opting instead for carports and cheaper building materials - the essence of post-war development and of urban sprawl, turning orange groves in Southern California into those cliched cookie-cutter houses. The gigantic artworks owned by The Broad then, are both symbols and literal embodiments of the surplus value extracted by pushing outward the fabric of American cities into the country as cheaply and homogeneously as possible.

Through a loosely sociological reading of The Broad, we can understand the over-sized artworks in the gallery as ornament at the urban scale. They are totems of development, of embodied real estate profit.

In the experience of the building, abstract notions like the accumulation of profit through the development of mass-produced suburban housing take on physical qualities in the perverse luster, for instance, of Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog. This particular sculpture happens to be the perfect allegory for the entitlement of capitalistic profit without regard for the costs and externalities borne by larger systems or other people.

Indeed a beautifully fabricated object, this piece also represents an exploitative post-war worldview, and the ecosystem that worldview uses to create and preserve value. Here, tied up in the folds of the balloon, is a singular representation of the flow of suburban real estate profits into art as a speculative investment and store of value. In fact, those profits are literally responsible for bringing this sculpture into the world. The Celebration series of sculptures, to which Balloon Dog belongs, was so costly to produce that Koons had to seek funding from patrons to invest in the actual fabrication of the objects themselves. Among those who invested early on was Eli Broad.

Seemingly an innocent children’s toy, the sculpture is also illustrative of a child’s entitlement, and more metaphorically, the entitlement of a system that treats natural resources - land, oil, water, air - as expendable while preserving abstract notions of value in a climate-controlled environment for the protection of art - objects so precious that direct sunlight must never touch them.

A Trumpian Tax Break

The Broad is currently 4 years into a 99-year lease with the City of Los Angeles' Community Redevelopment Agency, which owns the plot of land where the building sits. For the lease, the Broad paid $7.7 million. To lock in more than an acre of prime real estate in DTLA for the next century, that rent is a pittance.

To break the numbers down, a $7.7 million lease over 99-years equals a rent of $77,777 per year. At a size of 120,000 sq.ft., the Broad is paying 65 cents per sq.ft. per year on the building’s floor space. For reference, current real estate rates might be in the 20-30 dollars per sq.ft. per year range.

For the lease, the Broad paid $7.7 million. To lock in more than an acre of prime real estate in DTLA for the next century, that rent is a pittance.

In the context of 1980s downtown LA, this would be an attractive deal for the city. But in light of the ongoing development in the neighborhood in an increasingly desirable urban site, it may be more and more a benediction for The Broad. Looking at New York as a precedent for similar deals begins to make more sense. 

In a move that seems characteristic of this time, the city of LA sold the site’s future based on present circumstances. The Broad is able to store its investment portfolio, or art collection, in a manner that minimizes the speculative risks of art collecting. Here they make two major hedges against volatility. They both reduce the cost of art storage and publicize it. With their storage subsidized by the city, they can hold on to pieces over long periods of time, all the while, offering public access to their catalog raises perceptions of its value via their own promotion and display - an ouroboros of art investing.

So what about the Architecture?

The physical architecture of this building is both visually compelling and disingenuous. The building fits, in other words, with the old Hollywood cliché of being beautiful and fake. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, it seems to consist, more than anything, of quotations to their past work and to other styles. To this end, it falls prey to much of the easy criticism lobbed at postmodern architecture: that it’s overly stylistic and inauthentic.

The Broad is able to store its investment portfolio, or art collection, in a manner that minimizes the speculative risks of art collecting.

While DS+R have provided a marketable shorthand for the public to quickly understand the architectural concept of the building in “the Veil and the Vault,” the reality of the building is flattened version of the concept. The words “lightweight” and “translucent,” essential qualities of any veil, would never be used to describe the exterior cladding, and the cave-like geometry of “the Vault” is a sheet of thin plaster. It is a stage set, in other words, like the postmodern embrace of architecture as scenography.

Here too, they play their old classics, like “Window to the Back,” and “Wedge: Lift the Cladding for the Entrance.” In the cladding, there’s a clear indebtedness to the American Cement Building, while the sculptural form associated with the vault is arguably a generic reference to West Coast formalism.

Butts Out

DS+R, a New York firm, built their firm on ideas endemic to New York City, ideas that have to do with public space, and that elusive sense of urbanity New York cultivates so well. In their own words on the prospect of building in LA, they were skeptical and approached the project with irony. (A New Yorker approach LA with irony? Never heard of it, said no Angeleno ever.)

Inward looking without the benefits of introversion, The Broad doesn’t add much in an urban sense to LA, other than populating the sidewalk on Grand Avenue with people waiting in the entrance line. I suspect that may be all DS+R was looking to do for LA: to put more people on the sidewalk in general.  

This is unfortunate, because by so heavily programming Grand Avenue, they’ve shortchanged possibilities for the backside of the building. Considering that the butt-end of the building will serve as the facade for visitors who approach by train, this is a gross oversight, especially for architects who so heavily disparage car culture. (The 2nd Pl./Hope St. Station now being built behind the building is part of Metro’s larger, ongoing Regional Connector Transit Project.) The cladding, supposedly “parametric,” here is composed of a solid, repeating panel in what essentially amounts to a massive CMU wall. It creates a space that’s more like the back alley of a big-box store than an urban space.

Yet, paradoxically, the backside here is exactly the part of the building that seems to offer the most promise for an urban condition in LA, which excels at informally inhabiting the overlooked, and in making the ungainly accessible. This strange patio offers possibilities similar to those to be found at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, the apotheosis of LA museums for its flexibility and disarming informality.