A Cold War Research Institute in Hawthorne

George Nowak, brise-soleil for Hahn Building, 1965, Hawthorne, Calif. Photo: Wende Museum

The Architect's Newspaper reports on the Wende Museum's planned study and collection storage facility, the Wende Institute for Archival Research. It's an adaptive reuse of George Nowak's 1965 Hahn Building in Hawthorne. Welcome Projects and BoydDesign are overseeing the transformation, which will preserve Nowak's concrete brise-soleil. The site is about 9 miles down the 405 from the Wende's Culver City museum.

BoydDesign founder Michael Boyd has an impressive mid-century résumé, having restored Paul Rudolph's New York penthouse and Oscar Niemeyer's Strick House in Santa Monica. The refurbished Hahn Building will have 24,000 sf of storage for the Wende Museum's collection of over 250,000 Cold War artifacts, artworks, and archives. Construction is expected to be complete in 2028.

Rendering of Institute for Archival Research with Wende logo