The Broad

The museum takes its name from Eli and Edythe Broad, who financed the building on Grand Avenue, estimated to have cost roughly 140 million dollars, and donated their contemporary art collection to house it. Architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, working with Gensler, wrapped the three-story building in what they call 'the veil,' a porous envelope of more than 2,500 rhomboidal fiberglass-reinforced concrete panels, with 318 skylight monitors that let diffused daylight into the third-floor galleries.

Inside, close to 2,000 artworks by roughly 200 artists focus on art made from the 1950s onward, including major holdings of Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, and Roy Lichtenstein, alongside the largest collection of Cindy Sherman's photographs anywhere, at 129 pieces. Because general admission to the permanent galleries has been free since opening day, and because much of the collection communicates through bold, easily recognizable imagery, it is a low-cost stop that also works well for visitors who are still building their English.