Eli Broad museum files $19.8 million lawsuit over delays

The Eli and Edythe Broad museum, currently under construction in Los Angeles, is suing German architectural fabricator Seele "for what it describes as delays in fabricating the building blocks for its unusual latticed facade," the New York Times reports.

The museum was slated to open by the end of this year, but its opening date has been pushed back to 2015. The $19.8 million suit was filed on Friday.

Here's more about the design by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, courtesy The Broad Art Foundation www.thebroad.org:

With its innovative “veil-and-vault” concept, the 120,000-sf, $140 million building will feature two floors of gallery space to showcase the Broad’s comprehensive collections and will be the headquarters of The Broad Art Foundation’s worldwide lending library.

Dubbed “the veil and the vault,” the museum’s design merges the two key components of the building: public exhibition space and archive/storage. Rather than relegate the archive/storage to secondary status, the “vault,” plays a key role in shaping the museum experience from entry to exit. Its heavy opaque mass is always in view, hovering midway in the building.

Its carved underside shapes the lobby below, while its top surface is the floor plate of the exhibition space. 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 daylight.

Founded in 2009 with an initial endowment of $1.9 million, HMC’s nonprofit Designing Futures Foundation (DFF) has donated about $230,000 in its three years of existence, including $105,000 in scholarships to California students. The grants help promising high schoolers with an interest in architecture, design, engineering, education, or healthcare pay for expenses like test preparation services, computers, and college entrance exam fees and tuition. The scholarships can be extended for up to five years of college.