Eli Broad is at it AGAIN??

The billionaire is reportedly looking at a Grand Avenue site for his art museum. Here’s what city officials should have in mind for possible negotiations. It's a familiar recipe for urban revitalization in downtown Los Angeles. Start with a nondescript parking lot in a strategically important location. Propose replacing it with a new building by an acclaimed architect. Repeat as often as politically or financially feasible.That was the plan for the first phase of the ambitious but now stalled Grand Avenue project, which called for a mixed-use complex by Frank Gehry to replace a parking structure across the avenue from Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall.And in the last few days have come a flurry of news reports that Eli Broad wants to build an 82,000-square-foot museum for his Broad Art Foundation on another site now filled with cars, this one a surface parking lot at the southwest corner of Grand Avenue and 2nd Street. Owned by the city, the property was originally pegged as part of the Grand Avenue development's second phase.

What would the arrival of the museum mean for Bunker Hill and downtown?Broad, naturally, can be expected to push hard for a site and a deal that best suits his foundation, his collection and his much-debated vision for Grand Avenue. Indeed, it seems likely that Broad has kept the other sites in contention largely as a way to boost his leverage on Bunker Hill.As is so often the case in Los Angeles, the question is who on the public side will be pushing back — and how effectively.Handing the site over to Broad will make sense for the city only if the museum project can avoid becoming an isolated, self-contained architectural attraction in the inglorious tradition of downtown development. Indeed, even as Grand Avenue has continued to collect individual buildings by leading architects, long-imagined improvements to its streetscape have largely failed to materialize.Talks over the Bunker Hill site will be complicated by the fact that Broad has served as co-chair of the board of the Grand Avenue Committee, which includes representatives from the city, county and Community Redevelopment Agency and has been overseeing the planned project with developer Related Cos. and Gehry.

As many are anticipating the supposed new project to reach final negotiations, the public is drawing weary. For this struggle fits with the ambitions of the Billionaire and his indecisiveness to pick a suitable place for his new adventure. However what are we to do, who really knows what kind of artwork Eli Broad has, and what about the design of this new museum, which will house his pieces, surely DTLA would be a great location, turning the downtown region into an even more mega center for the art and culture. Primly located across from the already steam engine museum MOCA, surely Broad's new project will stir up competition amongst curators, and that will be to the benefit of the general public. However my concern is Architecture of course, and how the monopolization of Gehry's design will soon infiltrate the DTLA region, it's time for that new great innovator to surface and give Gehry some competition as well. Only if I had finished college already, perhaps I would be that person to contend the marginalized world of Architecture in Southern Cali.