Broad Collection to be Built on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles; Broads Name Diller Scofidio + Renfro as Architect

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 23 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Broad Collection, a public museum of contemporary art and headquarters of The Broad Art Foundation's worldwide lending library, will be built on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles and will be designed by world-renowned architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad announced today.  

With today's approval by the Grand Avenue Authority, on the heels of unanimous support by the Los Angeles City Council and Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, the Broads have all the necessary approvals to build the approximately 120,000-square-foot museum. The Broads are expected to spend between $80 million and $100 million to build the museum and a parking garage, which was added to the project at the request of the CRA. They will also pay $7.7 million to lease the land, and they will endow The Broad Art Foundation with $200 million to cover ongoing annual operating expenses.

The Broads' decision comes after three years of evaluating locations in Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and Los Angeles.

"Our heart is on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles," said Eli Broad. "This is our gift to the city that has been so good to us. We want to make great works of contemporary art accessible to the broadest public, and we can think of no better location than in the center of the contemporary art capital of the world. We would like to extend our thanks to the city of Santa Monica for their generous offer and extraordinary willingness to work with us as we considered our options."

The museum will be built across the street from the Walt Disney Concert Hall and Museum of Contemporary Art on the southwest corner of Second Street and Upper Grand Avenue. The project, along with the Civic Park, is expected to jumpstart the Grand Avenue development. Construction of the three-story parking garage is slated to begin in October 2010.  

After conducting a private architectural competition in May with six world-class architects, the Broads selected New York-based Diller Scofidio + Renfro as the design architect. They will unveil designs this fall. The Broads also have selected the Santa Monica offices of Gensler to serve as the executive architect.

The museum construction is anticipated to begin in spring 2011 and be completed in late 2012.

"This will be an iconic piece of architecture, and I can think of no other two-block stretch anywhere in the world where you can see five works of such impressive contemporary architecture," said Broad, naming the other works on Grand Avenue: MOCA by Arata Isozaki, Walt Disney Concert Hall by Frank Gehry, the Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral by Rafael Moneo and the High School for the Visual and Performing Arts by Wolf Prix.

Among their notable works, Diller Scofidio + Renfro has designed the renovation and expansion of Lincoln Center in New York City, the new Institute of Contemporary Art on the Boston harbor, and the innovative High Line park in lower Manhattan. Projects in progress include the Creative Arts Center under construction at Brown University, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Archive, the Museum of Image & Sound in Rio de Janeiro, and an inflatable outdoor event space at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.

The DS+R studio has been awarded an AIA President's Award, the AIA Medal of Honor, the AIA Honor Award for Alice Tully Hall and the Institute of Contemporary Art, the National Design Award from the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and the Brunner Prize from the American Academy of the Arts and Letters. Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio are international fellows of the Royal Institute of British Architects and were the first architects to receive the MacArthur Foundation "genius award" in 1999.

The Broad Collection project will include approximately 50,000 square feet of sky lit galleries, a lecture hall for up to 200 people, and a public lobby with display space and a museum shop. The project will also include state-of-the-art archive, study and art storage space that will be available to scholars and curators who want to research works in the collection and borrow artworks for their institutions through The Broad Art Foundation's worldwide lending program.

The Broads created The Broad Art Foundation in 1984 as a pioneering lending library for contemporary artworks.  Dedicated to increasing access to contemporary art for audiences worldwide, the foundation has made nearly 8,000 loans to 485 museums and galleries around the world. In addition to The Broad Art Foundation's works, the loan program also makes available art from The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection, for a total of more than 2,000 works by nearly 200 artists. Together, the Broad Collections are among the most prominent collections of postwar and contemporary art in the world.

Among the artists represented in-depth in the Broad Collections are Joseph Beuys, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, John Baldessari, Mike Kelley, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Eric Fischl, Leon Golub, Andreas Gursky, Damien Hirst, Glenn Ligon, Sharon Lockhart, Lari Pittman, Charles Ray, Ed Ruscha, Philip Taaffe, Robert Therrien, Andy Warhol, Terry Winters, Christopher Wool, Richard Artschwager, Chuck Close, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella and Cy Twombly.  The Broad Collections include the largest grouping of Cindy Sherman works in the world, one of the largest of Jeff Koons, the largest collection of Roy Lichtenstein's works outside the Lichtenstein Foundation, and one of the most significant groupings of Christopher Wool paintings.

The Broads have demonstrated longstanding support of the arts, particularly in Los Angeles. Eli Broad was the founding chairman and is a life trustee of MOCA, to which the Broads gave a $30 million challenge grant in December 2008 to rebuild the museum's endowment and to provide exhibition support. He is currently a trustee of The Museum of Modern Art in New York and life trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where the Broads made a $60 million gift to build the Renzo Piano-designed Broad Contemporary Art Museum, which opened in February 2008, and to fund an art acquisition budget.

The Broad Foundation made a major contribution to the School of the Arts and Architecture at UCLA for The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center, designed by Richard Meier. They gave $28 million to Michigan State University, Eli Broad's alma mater, for the construction of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at MSU, designed by Zaha Hadid.

The Broad Foundations were established by entrepreneur and philanthropist Eli Broad to advance entrepreneurship for the public good in education, science and the arts. The Broad Foundations include The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and The Broad Art Foundation. The Broad Foundations' Internet address is www.broadfoundation.org.

SOURCE The Broad Foundations