Hammer Museum finally cues up a big expansion
Here's an early look
The Hammer Museum at UCLA is one of three public visual and performing arts centers at the School of the Arts and Architecture. The Hammer offers collections, exhibitions, and programs that span the classic to the contemporary in art, architecture, and design.
"Complaints about the Hammer Museum’s 1990 building in Westwood have always had the ring of a Borscht Belt routine. It’s a terrible piece of architecture. And there’s so little of it!
A half-hearted late-career flirtation with postmodernism by Edward Larrabee Barnes, an architect’s architect who did much finer work at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Maine’s Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and elsewhere, the Hammer is a largely windowless box wrapped in bands of white and gray marble. It’s pushed awkwardly against the back of Claud Beelman’s 1962 Occidental Petroleum tower on Wilshire Boulevard.
The museum’s patron, Armand Hammer, was also Occidental’s chairman, which explains the unusual connection between the two buildings. When UCLA took over the Hammer in 1994, that connection began to look more like a liability, or at least a historical relic. And with just 14,000 square feet of gallery space when it opened, the Hammer was cramped from the start. Now, after years of effective but piecemeal upgrades by Director Ann Philbin and Los Angeles architect Michael Maltzan, the Hammer is finally ready to break out of Ed Barnes’ box in dramatic fashion.
A new master plan from Maltzan’s firm calls for extending the museum into a large section of the tower, which UCLA purchased in 2015 for $92.5 million after Occidental moved its corporate offices to Houston. The university will use the top 11 stories of the building for administrative space, allowing the Hammer to occupy five floors at its base in addition to the Barnes building.
Philbin and Maltzan gave The Times an exclusive look at the plan earlier this month."— Christopher Hawthorne, Jan. 26
Read the full article at the Los Angeles Times website.