The Broad

The Broad is LA's most popular contemporary art museum — a honeycomb-like building on Grand Avenue in downtown designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro that houses the Eli and Edythe Broad collection of 2,000 works of postwar and contemporary art, including signature pieces by Jeff Koons, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Cindy Sherman, and Yayoi Kusama. The museum opened in 2015 with free general admission, which immediately made it the hardest ticket in LA (reservations book out weeks ahead).

Kusama's 'Infinity Mirrored Room — The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away,' a small chamber of mirrors and LED lights that creates the illusion of floating in infinite space, is the museum's most-requested experience and requires a separate timed-entry ticket on top of general admission. The installation is genuinely mesmerising — 30 seconds in a room that dissolves the boundary between your body and the cosmos — and the queue to experience it is a social phenomenon in itself.

The building's design — a porous white 'veil' wrapping a concrete 'vault' — creates a museum where the storage (visible through windows in the ground-floor lobby) is as much a part of the experience as the galleries. The third-floor gallery, with its column-free spaces and filtered natural light, provides excellent conditions for the large-scale paintings and sculptures that dominate the collection. The Broad sits next to Walt Disney Concert Hall (Frank Gehry's swooping stainless-steel masterpiece) and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), creating a cluster of cultural institutions that has made Grand Avenue LA's closest equivalent to a museum mile.