Broad Museum reveals plans for landscaped plaza, restaurant

The leaders of Eli Broad's planned Grand Avenue museum of contemporary art, to be called simply the Broad, will make news in three separate ways on Monday.

They will unveil designs for a new plaza adjacent to the museum by architects Diller, Scofidio + Renfro and landscape architect Walter Hood. They will name Bill Chait, who runs Bestia in the arts district, to oversee a new restaurant on the plaza with Timothy Hollingsworth, former chef de cuisine at French Laundry in the Napa Valley.

And they will announce that the opening of the museum has been pushed back from this fall to an unspecified date next year.

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It doesn't require too much cynicism to conclude that the release of the first two items is meant, in part, to draw some attention from the third. But for me the design of the plaza is the most meaningful bit of news here.

And that's not just because Bunker Hill is short on public space that is well-designed and friendly to pedestrians. It's also because the details of how the plaza will operate and who will own it make up a multilayered and in the end rather opaque story.

If the last few years have taught us anything about the role that public squares play in the contemporary city, it is that they are both more valuable to civic life and more fraught with legal and political complexity than ever.

The rise of digital technology has not dimmed our desire to gather in public. In fact, it may have intensified it. Recent revolutions have been sparked by a combination of text message and sit-in.

But scratch the legal surface of any public square, particularly in this country, and you're likely to find a tangle of restrictions and, in many cases, concessions to private interests.

In 2011 the Occupy movement sprung from Manhattan's Zuccotti Park, a privately owned public space a POPS, for short legally controlled by Brookfield Office Properties. Unlike city-owned parks in New York, Zuccotti was open 24 hours a day, making it possible for protestors to camp out there.

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Broad Museum reveals plans for landscaped plaza, restaurant