The Broad Museum

Half-shade architectural setting

"Invisible" glass in the entrance area of the museum thanks to seven-and-a-half metre high windows with profileless vertical joints.

The architects at Diller Scofidio + Renfro call their concept for The Broad "veil and vault", which combines two distinct and clearly visible functions in one form: The concave concrete structure inside, like a vault, houses the private collection of contemporary art of the museum's founders, Eli and Edythe Broad, which comprises some 2,000 works of art. The areas above and below this non-public storage facility are used for exhibitions and are fully enclosed by the veil, whose honeycomb-like lattice structure composed of glass-fibre-reinforced white concrete appears like a hovering blanket.

The perforated structure creates a breathtaking effect of semi-shade and filtered light on the upper exhibition level, which is intended to contrast with the normally dazzingly bright streets of Los Angeles. On the ground floor of the exhibition, which appears to have been carved out of the concrete vault of the warehouse, daylight is deliberately utilised to create refreshing half-shade, partly by the veil and partly due to the overhanging building structure.

To enable the twofold nature of this  light to be recognisable, the glass of the ground floor had to be colour-neutral, inconspicuous and, in a sense, invisible. This has been achieved with 7.5-metre-high glass panes, which reach from the floor to the ceiling without any cross-section and achieve an  extremely visually reduced appearance due to the profileless vertical joints.