Culver City's Wende Museum of the Cold War announces major expansion in Hawthorne

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The Wende Museum of the Cold War announced on Saturday that it plans to build a $16-million expansion in Hawthorne.The Culver City museum has purchased a historically significant midcentury modern building in Hawthorne, which it plans to transform into a research institute and interactive storage facility for its collections — a “living archive,” as it’s calling the facility.

The Wende plans to debut the space in spring 2028.“In the museum world, there’s typically public space and storage space — meaning dead storage,” Wende founder and Executive Director Justin Jampol said in an interview.

“And this living archive is a hybrid that combines both.It houses the collections and makes them accessible for discovery.”The 24,000-square-foot building was erected in 1965 by shopping mall pioneer and developer Ernest Hahn to serve as his corporate headquarters.

It was designed by movie theater architect George Nowak, who also designed the Writers Guild Theater.The Wende plans to renovate the building, adding a 7,000-square-foot extension, with flexibility to further expand in the future.

The facility will include state-of-the-art, climate-controlled storage for the museum’s more than 250,000-object collection of paintings, sculptures, photographs, tapestries and Cold War-era ephemera from the Soviet Union, East Bloc, China and other countries.Interactivity, however, is the goal: so there will be spaces for “respite and inspiration,” Jampol said, such as a “scholar’s garden,” reading rooms and a library with a community learning lab and free coffee for visitors.“The idea is to make it as engaging and comfortable as possible,” Jampol said.“Most archives are places that are very uncomfortable and uninspiring — think fluorescent lights blinking in a basement.

The idea here is to open this up in a way that makes people want to be here.And focus on ...