The Broad

From the sidewalk on Grand Avenue, the building looks like something grown rather than built: a white shell pierced by hundreds of angled openings, light glowing through its skin. Locals compare it to a honeycomb, a sponge, a cheese grater. Its architects simply call it the veil.

The Broad is a museum of contemporary art, and it carries the name of the couple who filled it. Eli Broad made two fortunes, one in homebuilding and one in insurance, and became one of the most active philanthropists in Los Angeles. With his wife Edythe, he spent almost fifty years collecting postwar and contemporary art, and the collection grew to roughly 2,000 works.

Rather than scatter that collection, the Broads built a home for it beside Walt Disney Concert Hall. The museum opened on September 20, 2015, and from the first day, general admission has been free. Eli Broad said he wanted no one to skip art because of a ticket price. He died in 2021, but the free-admission promise still stands.

The New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro designed the building around a blunt, useful idea they called the veil and the vault. The vault is a heavy concrete body that stores the collection in the middle of the building. The veil is the porous white wrapper that lifts at the corners and lets visitors slip underneath into the lobby.

The numbers behind the veil are pleasing in their excess: roughly 2,500 panels of fiberglass-reinforced concrete, most of them unique, hung on a steel frame so the whole wrapper seems to hover. At street level the corners lift like a curtain hem. The building cost around 140 million dollars.

Most museums hide their storage. The Broad shows it off. As you descend the stairs at the end of your visit, a wide window looks straight into the vault, where paintings hang on rolling steel racks like coats in an enormous closet. It is a quiet reminder that what hangs in the galleries is only a fraction of what the museum owns.

The way up is half the fun. A narrow escalator tunnels through the concrete vault, a gray throat that ends suddenly in light. You surface into one vast gallery, an open floor with no columns, lit by daylight that filters through the hundreds of skylight scoops in the veil overhead.

The names on the walls form a roll call of art since 1950: Andy Warhol's soup cans, Roy Lichtenstein's comic-strip dots, Jean-Michel Basquiat's electric scrawls, Cindy Sherman's staged photographs, Kara Walker's razor-sharp silhouettes, and Jeff Koons' polished steel sculptures, including a bouquet of tulips taller than any visitor.

The most photographed room holds almost nothing. Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirrored Room is a small chamber of mirrors, water, and hanging lights; you step inside for less than a minute and stand in what appears to be endless space. Entry requires a separate same-day sign-up, and the list often fills early, so start there if the room matters to you.

The Broad calls itself a lending library as much as a museum. Through its foundation, the collection has been lending works to museums around the world since the 1980s, so a painting you miss today may be hanging in Paris or Tokyo, doing its work somewhere else.

Step outside and the block itself is an argument about architecture. Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall folds its steel sails right next door. The Museum of Contemporary Art faces you from across Grand Avenue, and the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels stands a short walk north. Few streets in America pack this much ambitious building into a few hundred meters.

Timed tickets are free but disappear fast; reserve online in advance, or join the standby line early. Weekday mornings are calmest. The small plaza beside the museum, planted with century-old olive trees, is a good place to let the crowd thin out.

Free museums change how people behave. Visitors wander in on lunch breaks, teenagers come back three times in a month, and nobody rushes to get their money's worth, because there is no money to get worth of. Under the white veil, in the filtered daylight, art becomes what the Broads apparently wanted it to be: not a luxury, but part of the street.