LA Museum's Extension Has Split Personality

Critics are assessing Los Angeles's newest art institution, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, housed in a building by Renzo Piano on the campus of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It's a strange mix of public and private: The new building—to open Feb. 16—was funded by billionaire benefactor Eli Broad and integrated with LACMA before Broad announced that his collection won't be permanently housed there, after all.

The Los Angeles Times' Christopher Hawthorne sees echoes of Piano's earlier Centre Pompidou in Paris in the new building, which features an colorful exterior "spider" of interlocking escalators and stairs, though inside "the building is well-behaved to a fault." Piano's building encapsulates the feud between Broad's and LACMA director Michael Govan's "two very different ideas of how a museum in Los Angeles should look and operate." (More Los Angeles stories.)