The Broad Museum dropped some big news about one of the most highly-anticipated buildings of 2015 just as 2014 was wrapping up. The Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed museum, which is currently under construction on Grand Avenue in the Bunker Hill neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles, announced on December 31 that scaffolding has been removed on its nearly completed facade — referred to as “the veil” by the architects and the institution.
The Broad announced in a statement the “removal today of the final scaffolding from the exterior facade of the museum and the revelation for the first time of the full ‘veil’ wrapping the building. The exterior veil is a structural exoskeleton comprised of 2,500 fiberglass reinforced concrete panels and 650 tons of steel that drape over The Broad and appear to lift up at the south and north corners to define two street-level entrances.” All of which is to say that, in finally removing the scaffolding covering the structure’s exterior, the museum has come a great deal closer to lifting the veil (that, theoretically, will happen when the structure is fully finished and the uplifted corner details have been outfitted). Photographs of the unveiled facade (couldn’t resist!) show that ‘the oculus,’ an indentation into the veil at the center of the Grand Avenue-facing facade, has yet to be outfitted with its panels.
The veil facade was the center of controversy at the Broad in July 2014, when the museum sued the engineering subcontractor responsible for delivering the facade. “An engineering subcontractor’s delays in carrying out the most distinctive design features of the exterior of the Broad Collection contemporary art museum in downtown Los Angeles have put the project at least 15 months behind schedule, according to a suit the museum has brought against Seele Inc., the Germany-based engineering company,” the Los Angeles Times reported in June.
The $140 million and 120,000-square-foot structure is organized according to a “veil-and-vault” concept; the veil facade is placed over a three-story rectangular structure that contains two floors of gallery space, punctuated by a second-floor storage space that will be semi-transparent so as to allow visitors to peek into its holding space (‘the vault’). 2,000 artworks will be displayed and stored at the museum when it opens in fall 2015.
— Anna Kats (@fortunaviriliis )
Photo by Gary Leonard.
