London-based architectural practice Zaha Hadid Architects have completed The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University (MSU). The award-winning Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid inaugurated the building last month.
Dedicated to exploring global contemporary culture and ideas through art, the Broad Art Museum at MSU will serve as both an educational resource for the campus community and a cultural hub. The museum will present contemporary works within a historical context through access to a study collection of more than 7,500 objects, ranging from the Greek and Roman periods to modern art.
The contemporary museum building, located at the northern edge of the Michigan State University campus, is influenced by a set of movement paths that traverse and border the site. The vitality of street life on the northern side of Grand River Avenue and the historic heart of the university campus at the south side generate a network of paths and visual connections; some are part of the existing footpath layout, others create shortcuts
between the city and the campus side of Grand River Avenue.
The circulation travelling in an east-west direction on Grand River Avenue, along the main road of East Lansing and also on the main approach street to the campus produce an additional layer of connections that are applied to this highly frequented interface between city and campus.
Generating two dimensional planes from these lines of circulation and visual connections, the formal composition of the museum is achieved by folding these planes in three-dimensional space to define an interior landscape which brings together and negotiates the different pathways on which people move through and around the site. This dialogue of interconnecting geometries describes a series of spaces that offer a variety of adjacencies; allowing many different interpretations when designing exhibitions. Through this complexity, curators can interpret different leads and connections, different perspectives and relationships.
