Grand Avenue in Downtown LA is about to get two new buildings that may seem like more of the same old, same old. Or maybe not.
Both The Broad contemporary art museum and the Colburn School of Performing Arts are planning substantial additions to their downtown campuses, with splashy building plans that expand their footprints. The buildings will add a new relationship to the street and an extension of the cultural corridor both west and east.
But unlike earlier designs for the two Grand Ave. institutions, the new plans have public transit riders explicitly in mind – not drivers.
The street has spent decades struggling to establish itself as a destination, ever since the Community Redevelopment Agency swept away the community on Bunker Hill in the name of urban renewal. One of the obstacles to success has been the hellish road and freeway engineering that made Grand Ave. pretty much inaccessible to anyone on foot, and thoroughly confusing to car drivers. It also caused access to and from parking structures to be a primary design consideration.
Colburn School President Sel Kardan says, “The dream is just to have more people downtown, to get people out of their cars, out of the garages, to be here on the street, to experience the excitement, the performances that take place, the wonderful galleries that are here. To see students, see dancers walking across the street for their classes, and students with a cello case on their back, musicians going to play at the LA Phil, LA Opera, the Center Theatre Group. That’s the dream — really just a vibrant cultural neighborhood.”
Both the Colburn School building and The Broad expansion are scheduled to open in time for the 2028 Olympics.
An architectural rendering shows the planned expansion of The Broad contemporary art museum. Rendering courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
Only nine years after it opened to the public, The Broad plans an expansion designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the team behind the first building. The Broad will add 55,000 square feet of exhibition and performance space at the back of the current structure to accommodate crowds that have proven four times bigger than anticipated when it opened in 2015.
Shown in renderings as a folding gray facade dented with large openings, the museum’s extension takes its cues from the existing building, which the architects characterize as the Veil (the exterior cladding) and the Vault (the sculptural grey core that contains art storage).
More importantly, the building becomes more extroverted, adding two top-floor open-air courtyards where visitors can enjoy the LA outdoors and panoramic views from atop the hill. These assets were ignored in the first building, which instead turned inwards to its dark womb of a lobby and its escalator-come-birth canal up to the art.
Furthermore, the expansion faces not Grand Avenue but the Grand Avenue Arts/Bunker Hill transit station. Metro riders can arrive in style at a new covered plaza named after Los Angeles County’s first district supervisor, the Hilda Solis Plaza. The west-facing extension actively welcomes the transit rider.
An architectural rendering shows the new Colburn Center lit up at dusk. The transparent walls on studio spaces will allow passersby to see dancers rehearsing. Rendering courtesy of Frank O. Gehry & Gehry Partners, LLP.
The Colburn School of Performing Arts, founded at USC in 1950, provides music and dance training for young people and professional training for classical musicians. On Friday, the school broke ground on Colburn Center, a 100,000-square-foot addition that adds a 1,000-seat concert hall and completely new facilities for the dance program.
Architect Frank Gehry has designed the new structure for a site at 2nd Street between Olive and Hill. It sits east of The Grand retail, residential, and hotel development (also designed by Gehry), and next to his Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Compared with Disney Hall, the new Colburn Center is squarer and plainer than its voluptuous older cousin, but it promises to be a lantern of light and human-made dynamism. Three stories of dance halls are to be wrapped in glass, and there will be a rooftop garden.
The school’s president, Sel Kardan, explains, “The idea with the glass was to give people an opportunity to see the art that was being created there. So dance rehearsals and classes will be taking place throughout the day and performances in the evening, and there should be a wonderful amount of activity that can be seen from a distance in the building.”
Colburn will make its performance space available at affordable cost to LA arts organizations, Kardan says.
And, significantly, the center does away altogether with new parking. Kardan points out there is enough already close by. Besides, the school is near two subway lines and a high-speed bus lane.
**Correction 4/10/24: A previous version of this story said The Broad will add 70,000 square feet of exhibition and performance space at the back of the current structure. The actual square footage is 55,000.