Pouring Life Into Dead Space

Some buildings instantly raise a city’s cultural stature. Others are cultural drains. Few, however, can match the UCLA Hammer Museum in Westwood. Since opening its doors in 1990, the building has sucked the life out of anything that crossed its threshold.

Now, a $25-million planned renovation of the museum, to be unveiled today by museum director Ann Philbin, aims to change that. With 3,700 square feet of additional gallery space, a 280-seat theater and a new bookstore and cafe, the project promises to transform a dysfunctional museum into an agreeable place to view art.

But its underlying goals are far more subversive. Designed by Michael Maltzan in collaboration with graphic designer Bruce Mau and landscape architect Petra Blaisse, the renovation seeks to create a vibrant underground culture in the heart of a banal corporate tower. Think of it as guerrilla architecture. Its subtle forms and coded visual imagery thread their way through the existing building, creating a palpable tension between new and old. If it succeeds, it will crystallize a generational shift in the city’s cultural life.

The path hasn’t been easy. The original museum building is pure corporate schlock. Designed by Edward Larabee Barnes to house the late Armand Hammer’s largely mediocre art collection, it is a three-story structure clad in alternating bands of gray and white marble. Its form locks into the base of Hammer’s former corporate headquarters, the 16-story Occidental Petroleum tower, giving it the feel of an appendage.

Nor are things better inside. The watered-down classicism of the internal courtyard--which is surrounded by arcaded, open-air walkways--reeks of cultural pretension. The galleries, which are relegated to the second floor, are nearly impossible to find from the underground parking.

As if that weren’t enough, the design team faced severe restrictions on how much they could alter the existing structure. According to an agreement that dates back a decade, the exterior of the building had to remain largely untouched. Nor could the basic configuration of the museum be changed. Early plans--such as enclosing the museum’s internal courtyard under a glass roof--were rejected by the museum’s board as too costly.

The key, then, was how to reshape the museum’s identity without launching a full frontal attack on the building. Maltzan began by creating two distinct public images for the museum: one along Wilshire, the other along Lindbrook Avenue. On Wilshire, a blank wall will be set behind the existing glass facade, blocking the view from the street into the lobby. The wall will function like an enormous light box--a soothing, colored light will wash across its surface, a subtle evocation of the act of contemplation that is meant to take place inside.

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Along Lindbrook Avenue, by contrast, the museum will appear as a hive of activity. A long, narrow ramp extends along the street facade, leading to the cafe and theater. Behind it, a glass partition allows visitors to peer into the courtyard. The idea is to put the art world on display and, in the process, to create a stage for cultural debate.

But the museum’s real facade is underground. Visitors will pass from the parking through an entry set in a long illuminated wall, designed by Mau, that will glow with the museum’s logo, before they are whisked up to the Wilshire lobby by elevator. The lobby--now enclosed by walls on four sides--will be repainted by a different artists several times a year as part of the museum’s ongoing wall drawings program.

It is a clever act of appropriation, reminiscent of the political murals of revolutionary Russia or the graffiti art of the inner city. The artwork, in effect, has spilled out of the galleries into the corporate realm.

From there, you finally reach the heart of the design, the courtyard. The existing courtyard forms two interlocking squares. In the new design, a covered bridge will span the space, creating two distinct zones--one linked to the museum, the other to the theater. An asymmetrical grand stair will lead up to the bridge, which will give the second-floor galleries a prominence in the courtyard that they now lack.

The bridge serves a practical function, allowing visitors to move through the second-floor galleries in an uninterrupted loop. Formally, however, the bridge and stair are conceived as one fluid piece, set in tension against the existing building. Clad in metal, the elegant form seems to unfold inside the space, turning back on itself to create a roof over the stair. Maltzan calls it a knot. I like to think of it as a prosthetic device, the missing limb that will revive a dead space.

Perhaps the boldest move was conceived by Blaisse, the landscape designer. The courtyard floor, now a veneer of cold granite, will be sheathed in wood, its surface gently rising to create a low mound. The gesture infuses the project with life, as if the entire building were resting on an inflatable lung. Tall, lanky eucalyptus trees will be scattered across its surface. A reflecting pool will be tucked under the grand stair, casting a shimmering light across the court.

That sense of building tension is reinforced by the expansive use of glass. Large windows frame the bookstore and cafe at opposite ends of the courtyard. Each space is defined by the objects inside--the restaurant bar, the theater projection booth, the bookcases--which project into the central space like Kasimir Malevich’s floating Prouns.

If the design has a flaw, it is that it is too timid. The bridge form, in particular, is slightly static. It may lack the muscle to overcome the banality of the original structure. A more aggressive design, for example, could have picked up on the energy of the bulging floor, so that the entire courtyard begins to breathe with life.

As a strategy for building urban friction, however, the design is right on the mark. The project is reminiscent of Berlin’s Hackesche Hof--a hip East Berlin art complex centered on a series of small internal courts. In both, the courtyards become pressurized cultural mixing chambers, as if the buildings were under temporary occupation by foreign invaders.

Such spaces, and the art they house, are critical to a city’s social health. They recall the critic Dave Hickey’s idealized view of the art world as “a participatory republic, an accumulation of small, fragile, social occasions that provide the binding agent of fugitive communities.”

At the Hammer, that notion is modified to fit the unique character of Los Angeles. In the traditional city--Berlin, New York, Paris--public life spilled out of the living room onto the streets. In Los Angeles, cultural life takes place in isolated bubbles. The Hammer design suggests a new kind of cultural organism--a communal living room for art. In doing so, it helps to dismantle one of the city’s most pernicious attributes--an occasional, lingering provincialism.