Located in downtown Los Angeles, the 3-story, 120,000-sf Broad museum is home to nearly 2,000 works of art provided by The Broad Art Foundation and the personal collections of Eli and Edythe Broad, containing some of the most prominent holdings of postwar and contemporary art worldwide.

The museum’s unusual design emerged from the need to balance public exhibition space with secure archive/storage space. The result was a building formed by two key elements: an interior "vault" structure and an exterior "veil" envelope.

The vault plays a key role in shaping the museum experience from entry to exit. Occupying the entire second floor and part of the first, the vault stores most of the museum's collection, in addition to providing research and lending facilities. Although it is not open to the public, visitors can take a peek through windows on their way to the third-floor main gallery, which is accessible via a tubular 102-ft-long escalator and a glass elevator from the lobby. With a total of 50,000 sf of column-free gallery space, the museum can exhibit up to 300 artworks at any one time.

The vault is enveloped on all sides by the veil, an airy, honeycomb-like structure that spans across the block-long gallery and provides filtered natural light through 318 skylights (all facing north). Composed of 2,500 concrete panels with more than 400 trapezoidal shapes, the veil is connected to the concrete shear wall by a 650-ton structural steel net backing.

A 3-level, 150,071-sf, 366-stall parking garage partly below grade serves as the museum's foundation, and contains utilities, a loading dock and a heavy-duty elevator.