The Broad
The Broad sits on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles behind a skin of 2,500 rhomboidal fiberglass-concrete panels — a structure that manages to look both geological and futuristic depending on the light. Inside, two floors of gallery space hold more than 2,000 postwar and contemporary works from one of the more serious private collections assembled in the United States.
General admission to the permanent collection is free, which partly explains why the average visitor here is 33 years old and the standby line moves slowly. Timed tickets are released monthly and disappear fast — book before you arrive.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to book the Infinity Mirrored Room ticket separately and treat it as its own event — the 45 seconds inside Yayoi Kusama's installation go faster than you expect. The Thursday evening hours until 8 pm are noticeably quieter than weekend afternoons, and the public plaza's century-old Barouni olive trees make a decent place to decompress afterward.
Deals in The Broad
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How The Broad came to be
Eli and Edythe Broad began exploring sites for a public museum as early as 2008, and in August 2010 Eli Broad formally committed to building on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles. Six architecture firms competed for the commission — among them Rem Koolhaas, Herzog & de Meuron, and SANAA — before Diller Scofidio + Renfro, working with Gensler, were selected. The $140 million building took shape around what DS+R called 'the veil and the vault': a porous concrete-panel envelope filtering daylight over a protected gallery core.
The museum opened on September 20, 2015. Its founding director, art historian Joanne Heyler, oversees not just the galleries but the Broad Art Foundation's lending library, which has been placing collection works in museums worldwide since 1984. A 55,000-square-foot expansion, again by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, was announced in 2024 with a target completion tied to the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics.
Who and what shaped it
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Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.