Culver City’s Cold War museum plans expansion, affordable housing

Culver City’s Wende Museum wants to add community space and housing units to its property on Culver Boulevard.

Culver City’s City Planning Commission will review a proposed update to the Cold War-focused museum’s comprehensive plan on Wednesday night, according to Urbanize.

The update details a planned two-phase development project. The first phase would add a three-story, 7,000-square-foot community center on site. The building would include meeting spaces, archives, a garden, artifact storage, and rooms for events and the like.

Plans call for the incorporation of an existing building there, but also require the demolition of a 2,200-square-foot structure.

The second phase, initiated by the city, would add six small residential units on a part of the existing community garden. Each would be around 325 square feet and would be reserved as affordable units for low-income and homeless artists.

Westlake-based AUX Architecture is designing both the community center and the dwellings. Wende Museum aims to move the project forward quickly — the museum wants to break ground by January and complete the project by October of next year.

The project is one of the smaller development projects to crop up in Culver City as of late, where tech and media companies have flocked over the last several years.

One of the most recent projects proposed is Clarion Partners’ and Clarion Partners’ 150,000-square-foot office planned about a mile and a half north of the Wende Museum.

Not far away, Apple wants to add 500,000 square feet of office space to its holdings across National, Washington, and Venice boulevards.

Further south, Bastion Development wants to build a 144-unit apartment complex. It would be the firm’s fifth built or entitled project along Washington Boulevard.

Over the summer, Sandstone Properties secured approval for a 175-key hotel on the city’s south end after two years in the works. [Urbanize] — Dennis Lynch