The newest addition to this uneven parade of high-rises, cultural buildings and still-empty parcels is the Broad, a $140-million museum of modern and contemporary art set to open Sept. 20 at the corner of Grand and 2nd Street.
An efficient three-story box of exhibition and archive space wrapped in an eye-catching, bone-white honeycomb of fiberglass-reinforced concrete panels, it was designed by the New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R for short), which won a small invited competition organized in 2010 by Eli Broad, the billionaire philanthropist and art collector. ... It wouldn't be fair to say that the museum, which has moments of real charm, buckles under the burden of those expectations and conflicts. But in a number of places, including its surprisingly punchless facade, it shows the considerable strain of holding up that weight.
The elements of the Broad that have been most closely scrutinized or most often reworked, in fact, are the most uneven. It is only in the relative shadows — in the peripheral or easily overlooked spaces, or in the rooms added or enlarged late in the design process — that the architecture of the museum really comes to life.
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Against that complicated infrastructural backdrop, Broad and the architects understandably opted for an interior layout that is perfectly clear, if rather prescriptive: You take the escalator to the top floor to see the art. Then you take the stairs back down, peering into the archive along the way.
The result is a streamlined ratio of exhibition to ancillary space, something increasingly rare in an age of museum bloat. The Broad has 50,000 square feet of gallery space -- 35,000 on the third floor and 15,000 more on the first — in a building totaling 120,000 square feet. Renzo Piano's new Whitney Museum in New York has the same amount of interior exhibition space in a building covering 220,000 square feet.
Still, it's not in the center but around the edges of that basic sequence that the museum proves most compelling and full of personality — in the cylindrical glass elevator at the back of the lobby, for instance, or the small gallery next to it, framed in near-Baroque vertical folds and for now holding a fantastic mirrored installation by the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.
These moments and a handful of others show a verve that is elsewhere compromised, tamped down or reined in — and suggest that DS+R, for all its imaginative talent, is still figuring out how to shepherd its boldest design ideas through a challenging construction process, so they emerge fully and powerfully intact.
