Broad had a hand in a Renzo Piano building at LACMA, the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall and his own museum, by Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
It seems unlikely that a home builder whose big claim to fame is carpeting the Southwest with cookie-cutter tract houses would become one of L.A.’s most important architectural patrons. But Los Angeles is the kind of city where the most beautiful road in town is named for a water engineer, so perhaps it shouldn’t be entirely surprising. (See: Mulholland Drive.) Eli Broad, who died Friday at the age of 87, was a relentless shaper of the L.A. landscape — as a developer, insurance magnate, political patron, art collector and power broker. And his influence extended to architecture. Over the course of his life, he helped bring to fruition — in whole or in part — designs by an array of award-winning international design stars, including Richard Meier, Renzo Piano, Diller Scofidio + Renfro and, most famously, Frank Gehry. Or perhaps most infamously, because Broad’s relationship with Gehry was, well, fractious. In the late 1980s, Broad asked Gehry to design a house for him in Brentwood. Gehry accepted the commission on the basis that Broad would not set limits, nor impose a budget. Within two years, Broad had grown impatient with the slow pace — so he took Gehry’s working drawings and had the firm of Langdon Wilson build out the design. Gehry disowned the house and promised never to set foot in it. Later, in the 1990s, the two came to a head once again. When construction on Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall stalled in the late 1990s, Broad helped take charge of the $135-million fundraising campaign. He also tried to speed things along by taking the job of creating working drawings from Gehry’s firm and giving the job to another studio.
