Broad Contemporary Art Museum

In the case of Renzo Piano's extension of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which opens Feb. 16, the equation isn't quite so straightforward.

To begin with, LACMA has added substantially more than a single building. Though the 60,000-square-foot Broad Contemporary Art Museum, or BCAM, is getting most of the attention, Piano's changes to the sprawling museum campus also include a new entry pavilion and covered pedestrian walkway set back from Wilshire Boulevard, along with a reconfiguration of the ground floor of the 1965 Ahmanson Building to the east.

More to the point, it's a little hard to tell exactly who Piano's client is.

Is it Eli Broad, the billionaire LACMA trustee and donor who flew to Europe to recruit Piano personally after a bolder, more expensive expansion plan by Rem Koolhaas fell through?

Or is it Michael Govan, who took over as LACMA director two years ago, assuming responsibility for a design by an architect he likely would never have chosen himself?

The answer, of course, is both: Each man has a legitimate interest in even the most minor details of the expansion plan. Last month, after Broad made the surprise announcement that he wouldn't be donating his extensive collection to the museum, there was plenty of speculation about when and why his discussions with Govan over the fate of the artworks might have turned sour. But so far we've paid virtually no attention to the delicate back-and-forth between Govan and Broad over the details of Piano's design.

What a visit to the new LACMA makes clear is the extent to which the western half of its campus has become contested space, straining to hold two very different ideas of how a museum in Los Angeles should look and operate. One view belongs to Broad, 74, and the other to Govan, who is three decades younger. Much of the fun of making sense of the expanded museum, in fact, lies in figuring out whose influence and sensibility can be glimpsed in which parts of the new construction.

Broad has operated here as a patron in the classic sense of the word, working with his handpicked architect to produce a handsome, well-made container for his extensive collection.