This spring, L.A.’s hammer_museum is celebrating the completion of careful renovations. The director’s own home in Beverly Hills underwent a similarly meticulous process.
Like artful plastic surgery, a good renovation rejuvenates without calling attention to itself. The subtle 20-plus-year transformation of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, which Ann Philbin has overseen since becoming its director in 1999, culminates on March 26. It began with urgent remediation—“I literally had holes in the ground,” she told me—and progressed to a full-scale, $90 million revamping.
Under Philbin, the mission of the Hammer has changed more dramatically than its architecture. It is easy to forget that two decades ago, few women served as museum directors, and notwithstanding its distinguished art schools, Los Angeles was a backwater in the art world. When she was approached about the job, Philbin was director of the Drawing Center in New York.
In the guest bedroom, framed artworks by Kara Walker , Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, and Robert Gober; Mark Bradford, Mark Grotjahn, Dan Asher, and Kara Walker; Dave Eggers, Jagdeep Raina, Lari Pittman and Roy Dowell, and Kim Sook Song. The museum was originally balanced on a shaky tripod, and was jointly governed by the Hammer Foundation, Hammer’s corporation Occidental Petroleum, and UCLA, which dominates the district of Westwood, where the museum is located. Eventually, UCLA took sole control. When, in 2015, the university acquired Occidental’s 16-story “Oxy Tower” adjoining the museum, the Hammer received a 99-year lease on the lower five floors.
Many of the design changes—such as flattening the courtyard arches that she suspected were imposed on architect Edward Larrabee Barnes by his imperious client—were intended to bring out the original modernist vision. With Wornham, Philbin applied the same approach to her house in Beverly Hills, which was designed by Buff, Straub & Hensman and won an award from the American Institute of Architects. “We bought it from a woman who lived here for 50 years,” she said.
As with the Hammer, a tight budget ruled out most big-ticket improvements. “We said we could each do one extra thing we felt strongly about,” Philbin recalled. “Cynthia wanted the outdoor sound system, and I wanted the long bench”—a curvy banquette at the edge of the pool deck—“so we could entertain.”
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