View allAll Photos Tagged ClimateControlledStorage
The Broad's "veil and vault" concept is one of those rare cases where a museum's curatorial philosophy is literally built into the architecture. Diller Scofidio + Renfro, working with Gensler as executive architect, treated the storage component not as back-of-house infrastructure to be hidden but as the structural and conceptual core of the building — the dense concrete mass that the porous fiberglass-reinforced concrete veil wraps around. What you typically glimpse as a visitor is a single window cut into the third-floor escalator wall, a brief peek into the working stacks. This view is something else entirely: standing inside the vault itself, looking down the length of the rolling rack system.
I framed deliberately to let the receding ceiling grid pull the eye toward the vanishing point at the far end while the artworks on the right anchor the foreground — a Warhol camouflage-and-FABIS canvas, what reads as an Eric Fischl equestrian study, a Lichtenstein with its signature Ben-Day dots. The cool fluorescent wash flattens everything into an even, almost clinical register, which feels right for a space whose entire premise is that storage isn't separate from display. The polished concrete floor and exposed metal grating overhead reinforce the working-warehouse honesty of it. Nothing here is performing for the visitor; the architecture is just doing its job in plain sight.
Not only will climate-controlled storage protect a turtleneck collection, it will also protect stuff worth having.