Is the design for Eli Broad's $130-million namesake museum in Downtown Los Angeles, to be known simply as The Broad, in the process of being lobotomized?

The L.A. Times' Christopher Hawthorne thinks so, arguing that an updated version of the Diller Scofidio + Renfro design — set to be unveiled officially in a press conference with mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and architect co-founder Elizabeth Diller at the Disney Concert Hall today — gives "a sense of a restless creative imagination muted, held back and otherwise reined in," eliminating key design elements that helped the firm win the commission in the first place.

For one thing, an inventive scheme for the lobby that would have allowed a visual relationship between pedestrians and visitors arriving by car — which Hawthorne imagines as "a friendly but pointed confrontation between L.A. car culture and the city's slowly growing constituency for mass transit and better-designed public space" — will not be part of the finished design. Likewise, a series of intriguing digital billboards on the honeycomb-like exterior of the museum, envisioned to display a rotating series of digital artworks, will not go ahead.

"Right now they are not in the project," Diller told Hawthorne, adding, however, that "the project isn't over yet."

The news isn't all disheartening. Most importantly, the new design makes the site less self-contained by adding a plaza wrapping around the southern and western sides of the building. The public-minded addition is something of a coup, and would involve an agreement between the museum, the city's Community Redevelopment Agency, and developer Related Cos., which has to relocate a proposed tower in order to facilitate the plaza.

A related piece by the L.A. Times's Mike Boehm offers further details about the program and operations of the Broad Foundation, which is set to open in 2013. It will open with about 200 works on view, built around the likes of Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol; a third of the 33,000-square-foot exhibition space will be reserved for shows focusing on artists Broad and his wife, Edythe, have collected in depth; and the institution will offer free admission to members of the nearby MOCA, whose director, Jeffrey Deitch, Broad played an instrumental role in recruiting.

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But the most interesting tidbit is that Broad says in passing that MoMA head Glenn Lowry actually advised the super-collector against donating his art to the New York institution, where he serves as a board-member. Apparently, Lowry warned Broad that MoMA would "only show 30 or 40" of his often large-scale trophy works — which is either a complement to the strength of a collection that deserves its own space, or a backhanded slight, depending on how you take it.