Block party: Broad Contemporary Art Museum

The location is Los Angeles – Wilshire Boulevard, to be exact. The occasion is the opening of a major new museum, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM). And the architect is the Italian Renzo Piano who, with a recent string of commissions, seems to have supplanted local star Frank Gehry in America as museum designer of choice.

The BCAM opening was billed as the party of the decade. Stars such as Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, Christina Aguilera, Dustin Hoffman, Steve Martin and Anjelica Huston rubbed shoulders with artists including Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Mark Bradford and Barbara Kruger, and, from the East Coast, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman, Eric Fischl and Jeff Koons. Europe stayed away, apart from Damien Hirst who, bizarrely, is the only European artist represented in BCAM's first display.

Prior to this latest star-studded unveiling, Piano has been responsible for some of the most desirable museums in Europe and America. His first, the Pompidou Centre in Paris (1977), which he designed with Richard Rogers, was followed by the Fondation Beyeler outside Basel in Switzerland, and the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. They led to a clutch of awards including the Pritzker in 1998, the citation of which stated that his museums "show an unerring sensitivity for site and context, and a remarkable mastery of form, shape and space".

But Piano is far from just a museum architect, as the citation points out: "Piano proved himself a master of the gigantic project with Kansai, the world's largest air terminal in Osaka Bay, Japan, and again with the imposing Bercy Shopping Centre in Paris ... His soccer stadium in Bari, Italy, is like no other in the world."

Piano was born into a family of builders in Genoa, Italy in 1937. His grandfather, father, four uncles and brother were all contractors, and, Piano admits, he should have been one too but instead chose architecture, studying at the Milan Polytechnic Architecture School. After graduating in 1964, he worked first in his father's company, and then, from 1965-70, in Louis Kahn's offices in Philadelphia, and in London with the innovative engineer Z S Makowski.

Today, the 70-year-old Piano is sprightly and smartly dressed. He graciously acknowledges Eli Broad, a businessman whose fortune has been estimated at $5.8bn, as the force behind the BCAM building. Broad came to Piano in Paris and asked him to build the museum after a competition for the wing that had selected Rem Koolhaas as its architect had faltered at the fundraising stage. The building was completed in a speedy three years. One triumph during construction was the closure of a street and removal of a garage, which was replaced underground. As Piano said, "In LA, to take away a street is a miracle, to take away a garage is like destroying the Colosseum in Rome!".

High on the architect's list of priorities was the showcasing of natural light inside. He explains that the building is based on the idea of a barn and is purely functional. "The only frivolous thing is the toilets," he says. In the entrance is a smooth wall of travertine marble, quarried in Tivoli and transported to Massa in Italy to be cut before being shipped to LA.

As with the Pompidou Centre, Piano has applied the "infrastructure" to the exterior, a response to the "extroverted nature of contemporary art". The red of the external escape stairs and escalator – the "arteries", as he calls them – was chosen "for enjoyment, which is a catalyst for culture". It is a pulse-quickening ride as we slowly ascend the very long, very red escalator. At the top there is a viewing deck from which one can enjoy views of LA and even spot the Hollywood sign.

Large banners by the LA-based artist Baldessari dominate the museum's frontage. Piano says he got the idea from one of his passions, sailing. "They are made like halyards so we can roll them up and put them in the vault." Sail forms also appear in the baffles on the top of the building that control the natural light entering the top floors. It's an image that recurs in his work (Piano has also designed cruise ships and sailing boats). He liked the idea of banners as they would move in the breeze and represent the artist's canvas (in the past, Piano has also talked of a childhood memory of sheets billowing on a Genoese rooftop). At around 50ft long, they're certainly dramatic.

It fell to LA-based artist Burden to further enliven the frontage with his staggering installation Urban Light, composed of reclaimed street lights that, at night, produce a much- needed punctuation point to the glossiness of the building. Inside, the floors are elegant showing spaces, with the top floor beautifully lit from above. But by the time one has descended and arrived at the first floor, where two huge Serra sculptures duke it out for supremacy, one is as aware of the power of the buck as one is of the thrill of the architecture.

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