The entrance to the Broad 
Photo by Iwan Baan, courtesy of The Broad and Diller Scofidio + Renfro The entrance to the Broad 

The 120,000-square-foot Broad museum in Los Angeles opens to the public on Sunday. The new contemporary art museum, designed by New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro with Gensler, will house roughly 2,000 pieces from the collection of Eli and Edythe Broad. ARCHITECT contributor Joseph Giovannini wrote about the project earlier this month:

"DS+R designed the skin of the building as a field of 2,500 rhomboidal modular panels of fiberglass reinforced concrete, distantly recalling the panelized façades of Marcel Breuer’s buildings from the Sixties—but distorted. With parametrics, the honeycomb exoskeleton, suspended on a steel frame, was designed so that all panels, acting collectively as a brise-soleil, have orientations calibrated to shield the interior from direct sunlight, regardless of the season or time of day. A wormhole in the skin of the façade creates an exceptional moment, a singularity within the field of subtly differentiated panels that signals an exceptional space within, the auditorium. The rooflines appear to slope, as though in forced, two-point perspective, a perceptual illusion resulting from a grid stretched like panty hose to guarantee proper solar orientation."

Other critics have weighed in as well. Paul Goldberger, Hon. AIA, writes in Vanity Fair: "This is a building that can be architecturally exciting, and it is also a building that can be a good place for the display of art. What is unfortunate is that achieving the second quality depends to a large extent on suppressing the first." In The Guardian, Oliver Wainwright describes the structure as "a startling concrete box perforated with thousands of angular holes, giving it the look of a supersized cheese grater – ready to shred any other building that dares come close." And the city's own Christopher Hawthorne writes in the Los Angeles Times: "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." Read how the architects describe the project in ARCHITECT's Project Gallery

Check out ARCHITECT's past coverage of the Broad, and read more about the project in ARCHITECT's Project Gallery.