embracing late modern by kazys varnelis

Situated between the domesticated modernism of the Case Study Houses and the Santa Monica School neo-avant-garde, Los Angeles's late modern architects, big firms like Victor Gruen Associates, Luckman and Pereira, Albert C. Martin and Associates, and Welton Becket did much to reshape the cityscape during the years between the Korean and Vietnam wars. Yet, while work of this era elsewhere has been the subject of much attention in venues from Wallpaper* magazine to academic conferences, its Los Angeles manifestation remains little appreciated.

The chief guidebook to the city, David Gebhard and Robert Winter's Los Angeles: an Architectural Guide, describes the office buildings and civic architecture of the period as possessing "in most instances an unbearable monotony." In his Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies, Reyner Banham ignores it entirely. This is more charitable than the recent attention paid it by Rem Koolhaas, an architect who has virtually made his name by reappropriating late modern forms and techniques, but who in 2002 proposed to tear down the Luckman and Pereira complex at LACMA. Instead of reacting with shock, most local critics applauded his decisive spirit and took the opportunity to condemn the existing structures.

There are, however, signs on the horizon that the work of the LA late moderns is being rediscovered. Gruen has been the subject of academic interest for some time now. In 2002 the University of California-Irvine held a symposium on Pereira and USC Guild Press published a handsome edition of his works. In March of 2003, the LA Conservancy's Modern Committee celebrated Welton Becket's work at an event held in his Cinerama Dome.

But a resuscitation of the LA late moderns reputation won't come easily. They lack the avant-gardiste romance of Gill, Wright, Schindler, or Neutra. There is none of the intimate domesticity of the Case Study houses. Nor is there the zaniness that characterizes Art Deco or 50s Googie modernism. Lacking an intellectual pedigree or theoretical position, this work has not usually held the attention of academics. This was big, serious architecture meant to be taken largely as built. Moreover, the contemporary scene does not look up to these firms; this is the work that the Los Angeles 12 and the Santa Monica School reacted against.

Modernism was no longer revolutionary for the late moderns. Instead, they worked to give physical form to big business and big government. As these would come under scathing criticism in the 1960s, the late moderns would be tarred along with them. Yet many late modernists already sensed that something was going wrong in the postwar city. The problem of congested city centers, so key to the advocacy of modernist urban planning had been exacerbated, not solved, by decentralization. Businessmen, so eager to build imposing modernist headquarters, shared little enthusiasm for progressive housing models and instead built thousands of acres of tract homes. Government lending policies promoted mindless suburban sprawl.

If the late moderns had lost the stridency of the avant-garde, they still hoped to reshape the city. This was an urgent task: the Southern California landscape was reshaped more thoroughly during the 1950s and 1960s than during any previous or subsequent decades. As this happened, profit-oriented construction produced waste, inefficiency, and a disregard for urbanity. In the new suburbs of the immediate postwar era, any broader sense of the civic was an afterthought at best. LA's late moderns had the ambition to remedy that.

Victor Gruen, in particular, railed against the destruction of the city and the proliferation of what he called "subcityscape," the gas stations, car lots, billboards, and trash prevalent in the day. In his 1964 book The Heart of Our Cities, Gruen proposed a polycentric city model as an alternative to the existing condition of central-core congestion and suburban sprawl. Gruen believed that through the introduction of subsidiary nuclei - for working, shopping, or education - in the previously homogeneous suburbs, monotony would be undone, pressure on traffic to city cores would be relieved, and urbanity would thrive.

Envisioning a concentrated new shopping district that would act as a modern agora, Gruen developed the shopping mall. In his vision, this would be no mere cathedral of consumption, but rather would have rich programming generated by residents of the local community and would limit commercialism's excesses by regulating signage and nearby development. Although the end product is certainly not without its faults, how many other architects can claim to have developed a new typology virtually single-handedly?

At Irvine Ranch, William L. Pereira Associates explored the possibilities for making a community that would avoid the monotony of the suburbs and would be sustainable over a long period of time. Given the program of a campus for the University of California, education was at the core of the project, but Pereira introduced a rich integration of offices, government, and commercial facilities along with single family and apartment living. Inspired by the Garden City movement, Pereira paid ample attention to greenbelts, many of which remain in place today. So, too, he created intensive centers of concentrated activity, the very opposite of suburban sprawl, a move that appears to reflect the thinking of Team X as well as critic William Whyte's call for clusters of density in the suburbs.

Nor was the work of the LA late moderns confined to the suburbs. Take Welton Becket's Century City Master plan, Capital Records Building and Beverly Hilton or Pereira and Luckmanís LACMA complex and CBS Television City, the latter still as fresh as anything being done today. But the crowning urban moment of the LA late moderns would have to be the pairing of Welton Becketís Music Center and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power building by AC Martin. Here, Gruen's vision of a pedestrian downtown center revolving around culture is fulfilled in an architectural water fantasy.

If there is any building in Los Angeles that marks the end of late modernism, it is the Pacific Design Center, designed by Cesar Pelli for Victor Gruen Associates and completed in 1975. While the PDC is out-of-scale in regards to the surrounding community, it is deliberately so. In contrast to the tactic taken by more recent projects such as the Grove, Old Town Pasadena, or Hollywood and Highland, Pelli's PDC avoided any false contextualism, feeling this would have damaged the surrounding texture irreperably. Instead, at a local level the PDC's blue glass surface reflects back the surrounding cityscape, making it legible while at the scale of the city, it acts as a landmark, a great blue toy in the landscape.

Perhaps we will discover some affinity between this era and our own, post-doc.com, age. Theory and subversion, the driving forces of neo-avant-garde practice in the early 1990s, seem to have run aground. Likewise, architecture's more recent infatuation with business strategies of the new economy seems to have cooled as the stock market has collapsed.

The late moderns may have been big, even dinosaur-like, but who wouldn't deny that the dinosaurs were among the most noble of creatures? The late moderns were not afraid to engage the city, to make big plans, to dream of a civic realm, of solutions to sprawl. Contemporary architects, who may envision themselves in the role of the supposedly more nimble mammals, need to learn to dream these kind of dreams again.

Previously published in March/April 2003 issue of LA Architect magazine.

Kazys Varnelis received his Ph.D. in the History of Architecture and Urbanism from Cornell University in 1994, and has taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He has lectured in numerous venues in both North America and Europe and his work has been published widely both in the US and abroad. With Robert Sumrell, he founded AUDC, an architectural research collaborative in 2001. His teaching and research focuses on late modernism, architecture and capitalism, and the impact of recent changes in telecommunications and demographics on the contemporary city in general and on Los Angeles in particular. He is editing Simultaneous Environments, a book on contemporary architecture and urbanism in Los Angeles.

william pereira by scott johnson

Some years after Bill's death, Allen Temko, the longtime architectural critic of the San Francisco Chronicle and modernist devotee, reminded me of one of his favorite celebrity lines: "Bill Pereira was Hollywood's idea of an architect." He was, of course, referring to Bill's lifestyle, his statuesque figure, his penchant for Bentleys and Lear Jet travel, his preferential dress in black and white, and the perennial blondes and British that seemed to surround him. Allen's remark, an acerbic and sly bullet was aimed to kill, but as I have revisited it over the years I find that perhaps like all intended truths in a postmodern world, it may have a greater meaning than the one which Allen intended. Bill and Allen had gone to war in the early 70's over San Francisco's Transamerica Pyramid, and the forward march of time and ideas was finding Bill's intense nostalgia for the future neatly matched by Allen's growing nostalgia for a modernist past.

Bill Pereira grew up in Chicago, where following an architectural degree at the University of Illinois, he joined the office of Holabird & Root, helping to masterplan the 1933 World's Fair. Joining his brother, Hal, an artist and designer, they soon created Pereira and Pereira, latched onto movie theatre design in the days when film studios controlled their own national theatre chains. While still in their 20's, he and Hal designed dozens of movie theatres and interiors across the country, among them the landmark and high style Esquire Theatre of Chicago.

Relocating to Southern California in the late 30's following a move by his brother, Bill continued his work as an architect while also acting as a production designer for Paramount, RKO, and David O. Selznick. In 1942, he received an Academy Award for "Reap the Wild Wind." In a balancing act which must have been exhilarating, Pereira was also designing the Lake County Tuberculosis Sanitarium in Wisconsin which received a Museum of Modern Art Award in 1944.

Throughout the late 40's, Bill's work grew in diversity, anchored in a growing post-war Southern California where autos, aerospace, movie studios, corporate culture, and the emerging presence of television were centered. In 1950, joining his former classmate from Chicago, and the prematurely retired CEO of Lever Brothers, Charles Luckman, Pereira and Luckman was founded. Billís involvement with the studios led to the commission for CBS Television City in central Los Angeles, while Charles' New York presence led to an initial scheme for Seagram's Park Avenue headquarters. That scheme was, as we now know, famously overtaken by Phyllis Lambertís involvement and familial connection and the subsequent decision to commission Mies Van der Rohe with Philip Johnson to design the building we know today.

For a brief period, until 1958, Pereira and Luckman seemed to garner enormous and significant commissions. Their office grew to 300 architects, overtaking the size of other major regional offices such as Welton Becket and Albert C. Martin. By the end of the decade, however, the office proved to be still not big enough for the two of them and they separated, Bill returning for a time to a more modestly scaled practice which included both large scale masterplanning as well as architecture, even as he began a long stint as a studio professor at the University of Southern California's School of Architecture.

It was in this period when Bill Pereira developed his practice and ultimately the work for which he is largely remembered. It was a unique period in the history of California, one in which suburbs were being built at a frantic pace in concert with massive federally funded highway construction programs. Private agricultural lands were being replanned as mixed-use exurban commercial centers while central cities were exploiting broad powers of urban renewal and eminent domain, clearing large and historic downtown neighborhoods such as Bunker Hill. William L. Pereira Associates managed to be centrally involved in the architectural outfall of these regional events while masterplanning activities transported the practice to Cape Canaveral, army bases overseas, and university and medical campuses worldwide.

The work of William L. Pereira Associates in its prime was voluminous and diverse. Some of the projects which became highly visible and display the idealism and iconography for which Bill became known include work for Transamerica, a financial services conglomerate which was originally headquartered in downtown Los Angeles in the early 60's. Looking for a new and centrally located corporate headquarters, Bill had performed masterplanning services throughout the region and was convinced that downtown was the desired location and that the neighborhood today known as South Park was the direction which new development would take. Downtown's first modern highrise was then built, a modernist confection of glassy ground level spaces, interior gardens, terrazzo floors, luminous ceilings, expressed steel structure, a highly molded curtainwall, and an observatory and all glass restaurant at the top. The building towered over the rest of the city while downtown development suddenly lurched west along Wilshire and 7th, leaving Transamerica to stand in isolation to this day. Some 40 years later, as South Park receives the attention and investment of a new generation, it now seems possible that this neighborhood will intensify.

San Francisco ultimately became both the headquarters and the location for Transamerica's most visible symbol, the Transamerica Pyramid. This design was based on a black model of a similar building designed for ABC on New Yorkís Sixth Avenue. The model sat under a drafting table in the rear of the studio for years. Positioned on axis at the foot of San Francisco's Columbus Street, the needlelike design for Transamerica fostered a contentious and protracted battle among constituent groups, ultimately leading to its approval and construction. The imageability of the building seemed finally to capture the marriage of a simple iconography and the branding requirements of a large but otherwise invisible corporate culture.

The original Los Angeles County Museum of Art was also designed by Bill. The building complex sited in the County Park along Wilshire Boulevard was a meditation on the contemporaneous activities at New York's Lincoln Center. The nesting of three principal pavilions around a large entry plaza recalls the Manhattan truce called by Edward Durell Stone, Philip Johnson, and Gordon Bunshaft. With the addition of a good measure of decorative lacework and festive lagoons and fountains, the new project sought to morph the surrounding LaBrea Tar Pits into a celebrity work for high culture. Architectural exhuberance asserted the Museum's ambitions while masking its modest collections of the day.

The post-mortem scrum over the design credits for the Theme Tower at Los Angeles International Airport has always amused me. The futuristic praying mantis which hovers above the airport's middle ground was the product of a joint venture between Welton Becket, William Pereira, and Paul Williams. Strategic and unlikely partnerships for architectural commissions at the airport seem to have been the order of the day then much as they are today. A photo of the completed building always hung outside Bill Pereira's office and senior architects and surviving airport officials appear to look to Bill as the lead designer for what was finally built, notwithstanding claims from every corner. Certainly the building's iconic futurism and its stylized and bare-faced optimism embody much of Bill's work in this period.

Finally, the building which has most interested me was always his own house on Rossmore Avenue in Hancock Park. It was featured in the 1963 Time Magazine article on him and has largely gone unacknowledged. It sat on a narrow lot, shrouded by adjacent tree cover and was in many ways a straightforward exercise in International Style volumetrics. Still, the house was decoratively staged with painting and sculpture, window coverings, area rugs, and 50's style ornamental iron. The lighting was carefully set and mood-defining while the base of the house was again disaggregated from the ground plane by a series of orthogonal reflecting pools. The atmospheric whole was a shimmering cinematic set piece of modernity, acquisition and transcendence. On a street of large houses of questionable historic provenance, Bill had produced in the design of his house, a frame, much as an art director would construct a film.

And so, getting back to the stuff of Allen Temko's epithet, we are reminded how the storyline of an architect's life is inevitably merged with the history of his contribution. There is little question that Bill tapped into the romanticized zeitgeist of his time with work on tropical islands (Makaha Inn and Country Club), desert landscapes (the Flamingo Las Vegas), the rugged coastline (Marineland of the Pacific and Catalina), and the exhilaration of aerospace, media and world travel. His unique and triangular marriage of personal style, highly narrative programs, and his penchant for achieving an iconic and idealistic moment with his architecture seems to mark him for Temko's aim.

Still, as the impact of European modernism has waned, and frequently urgent but weightless movements have struggled to fill its huge void, it must be said that the omnipresence of cinema, and the camera's intrinsic nature to scan, to layer, and to present with a kind of amorality, has now irreversibly altered our way of seeing "the facts on the ground." And it seems possible now, that for its inevitable mortality, the work of William Pereira may awaken a new and younger audience, one accustomed to the eclecticism of the Coen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino, one that finds simple pleasures in modernist diners, carwashes and bowling alleys, and one that sees all works of production streaming lifestyle options and settings, not a moral imperative, nor an answer to all of life's greatest questions. And maybe Allen Temko's remark will be proven to be right. In ways he didn't imagine.

Scott Johnson is a prolific designer of residential, commercial and institutional building projects, including three high rise buildings in Century City, California; the Opus One and Byron Wineries in the Napa Valley and Santa Barbara County, respectively; Rincon Center in San Francisco; and the new Capitol Area East End in Sacramento. Johnson worked at The Architects Collaborative in Cambridge, Mass, the Los Angeles and San Francisco offices of Skidmore Owings Merrill and the office of Philip Johnson and John Burgee in New York City. Joining Pereira Associates in Los Angeles in 1983 as Principal and Design Director, he and William Fain acquired the firm now known as Johnson Fain in 1987. In addition to designing nearly 100 built projects in the past 16 years, Johnson has also taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, UCLA School of Art and Architecture, and was recently appointed Director of the Masters of Architecture program at the USC School of Architecture. Active in the arts community, he is a Founder of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and serves as a board director of the Collage Dance Theater, the Craft and Folk Art Museum, and a member of MOCA’s Drawings Committee.

Further reading : William Pereira by James Steele

victor gruen today by daniel herman

Though he is better known for his shopping malls of the 1950's and 60's, Victor Gruen spent the earlier part of his career designing stores. As M. Jeffrey Hardwick’s recent biography of Gruen, Mall Maker (2004), tells it, Gruen began his career in the mid-1930s as a designer of modernist boutiques in Vienna. After emigrating to the US in 1938, he remained committed to reinventing the modern store. His designs for stores such as Ciro's on Fifth Avenue and Barton's Bonbonniere on Broadway still look fresh today. By 1941, Gruen had established himself as the preeminent store designer in the US.

It was around this time that Gruen relocated his office to Los Angeles, and began doing larger chain-stores. He did a series of stores in the LA area for Grayson's Ladies Ready to Wear—on Hollywood Boulevard, Crenshaw Boulevard and Third Street, as well as assorted other chain stores, including Wynn's Furniture in Inglewood and Milliron's in Westchester.

Now, the chances that any of these stores or even the buildings are still in existence over fifty years later is slim at best. Indeed, it is gospel in shopping architecture that a store design has a life span of ten years. Many stores go out of business well before that, usually for reasons other than the architecture. If they do make it to the ten year mark, they have often been modified so much that the original design has become unrecognizable, buried beneath countless incremental renovations. Fifty years represents many lifetimes for a work of shopping architecture.

Still, I was interested to see what, if anything, was left of these early Gruen projects. For this study, I am indebted to Jeffrey Hardwick, who kindly e-mailed me the original photos, as well as the Central Library, where I was able to look up the store addresses in the 1948 Yellow Pages. The sites visited are:

Grayson's Ladies Ready to Wear, 3657 Crenshaw Blvd., LA

The exterior is surprisingly intact. The original massing of the façade, in spite of the overspray of grey paint, is legible. The current tenant is the Crenshaw Discount Store, which is using the street side only for signage, not entry. This is typical of Gruen's method during this period. The street façade directed bold signage at passing cars, while entry occurred from the parking lot behind the store.

Grayson's Ladies Ready to Wear, 8469 Crenshaw Blvd., LA

The original building is long gone. A much larger building now occupies the entire block—an ex-Safeway supermarket, set in a sea of parking. The supermarket appears to have gone through several later incarnations, including a gymnasium (the scoreboard and basketball hoops are still inside) and a church. It is now home to the Iglesia de Cristo Ministerios Llamada Final. It isn't entirely clear what the main signage on the building—“ACADEMY”—ever referred to, other than perhaps the nearby Academy Theater, a local landmark. It is worth noting, however, that, whatever the Academy was, they were resourceful: they reused five of the letters from the original Safeway sign, even cleverly inverting the “W” into an “M”.

Grayson's Ladies Ready to Wear, 1414 3rd St., Santa Monica

What was once probably a typical downtown shopping street has since the 1970s been the Third Street Promenade. Urban pedestrian malls such as this were a response to the suburban mall which was pulling shoppers out of traffic-clogged downtowns. As the inventor of the mall, Gruen has apparently engineered his own obsolesence on this one. What was probably a bold storefront design directed at passing cars no longer made sense after the advent of the pedestrian mall. The precise site of Grayson's is now a Champs outlet, an utterly banal composition of stainless steel, glass and blue squiggles.

Grayson's Ladies Ready to Wear, 6436 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood

Gruen's flashy neon storefront which dramatized the recessed entry is, alas, no more. In its place is For Play, a low-brow lingerie store that has apparently saved all notions of flashiness for its wares. The flat pink stucco bulkhead with hand-painted sign is dull and dreary.

Wynn's Furniture, 801 S. La Brea Ave., Inglewood

The distinctive shark-fin bookends remain, as does the general massing of this free-standing structure. However, all traces of glassy, dynamic modernism, including the voided corner showcase, have been eliminated, stuccoed over completely at street level and replaced with cheap vinyl punched windows at the upper level. The building now houses the Crusade Christian Faith Center (Dr. Virgil D. Patterson Sr. Pastor), entry in back.

Milliron's, 8379 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Westchester

A true milestone in shopping architecture, this store catapulted Gruen into much larger projects—what would become shopping malls. Now a Mervyn's department store, the building has just undergone another bad renovation. This time they've added a new entry piece onto the back. Unfortunately, this new portal, while feebly adopting some motifs of the original design (vertical fins, red paint to match the original brick infill panels), summarily destroys the most revolutionary feature of Gruen's 1949 design—the parking ramps that criss-crossed the back façade, bringing cars up and down from the rooftop parking deck.

Daniel Herman is an architect in Los Angeles.

Further reading : Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream by M. Jeffrey Hardwick

built by becket by alan hess

The mid decades of the twentieth century were the heyday of Imperial California. The Golden State's population swelled, its youth revolutionized the nation's commerce and culture, its entertainment industry colonized the globe, and its aerospace industry ruled the future.

Like all ascendant empires, Imperial California required an architecture to manifest its glory. No architect exceeded Welton Becket's influence in this period of expansion. The young man from Seattle who became a confidant of Walt Disney and architect for Buffy Chandler had arrived in L.A. in the 1930s at a time when he could substantially reshape the city. The highlights of his career are impressive: Hollywood's Capitol Records building gave Hollywood an instant postwar icon; Parker Center embodied all that was progressive and modern in city governance; Bullocks Pasadena showed that the new suburbs could be elegant; Los Angeles International (with Pereira, Luckman and Paul R. Williams) was a gateway to tomorrow; Fashion Island, the UCLA Medical Center, Pauley Pavilion, the Cinerama Dome, the Beverly Hilton, the plan for Century City, and crowning them all the Music Center -- a latter-day Acropolis for the arts. Each is a Becket design. Put them together and you have a comprehensive catalog of the era's confidence, innovation and progress.

Consider the number of landmarks in this list. Becket buildings molded our image of L.A. in this era. Even vanished Becket buildings have left an indelible after-image: the Pan Pacific Auditorium remains a part of the mental landscape of L.A. long after the actual building burned and crumbled.

So it should be surprising that Becket's name is not widely recognized or revered today. Mid-century Modern design is undergoing a welcome renaissance, but the architects we identify with it are mostly known for their residential design: Neutra, Eames, Lautner, Koenig, Ellwood – unlike Becket, whose work was largely civic, commercial and corporate.

Why aren't Becket's monuments similarly celebrated? One possible reason: many Angelenos still harbor ambivalence about this era which confirmed their city as a unique world capital. The era was the high water mark of suburbanization, constructing a city from a web of freeways, housing tracts, office buildings and shopping malls – everything that has become fashionable to dismiss as "sprawl." The polycentric city of today, woven together from hubs in Santa Monica, Westwood, Century City, Burbank, downtown, Costa Mesa and elsewhere, was cemented during this era, with the considerable architectural aid of Becket. Despite the fact that suburbanization is Los Angeles' natural inheritance, we prefer to live it, not think about it.

Another reason: Becket's very success. His buildings captured the personality of mid-century LA so well that they served as templates for many other buildings. His pioneering planning ideas were so influential that they established a norm. Becket buildings have blended with the pattern and texture of our postwar suburban metropolis so seamlessly that we take them utterly for granted. The suburban shopping mall set in its par terre of parking was pioneered by Bullock's Pasadena; the suburban civic design of Becket, Gruen, Pereira, A. C. Martin's prototype malls adapted modern space and uses with an abstracted neo-formalism of tapering columns and curving facades.

A fresh look at Welton Becket's career and influence would not only help us to understand his era, but ours. We would not be the city we are today if this era had not set us on a course with its innovations, its reach, its scale.

What was the Becket style? Modern, clean, well organized, on budget. At their best they could be as elegantly composed as a Neutra building (Parker Center) or as original as a Lautner building (the Capitol Records cylinder.) With a prolific output and an enormous staff – in the 1960s Welton Becket and Associates was the largest architecture firm in the nation -- not all the office's work was as fresh or innovative as these. The daunting challenge to large scale corporate architecture in the second half of the twentieth century was to supply industry and government with the shelter and symbols they needed, while avoiding blandness and oppressive size. Welton Becket and Associates did not always escape those pitfalls. But measured by the best of their buildings, Becket's record bears comparison to any other large firm in the nation.

----

Becket had arrived in Los Angeles from his native Seattle at the right time. The multi-centered metropolis, the commercial suburban city that he would help articulate, was already taking root in the early 1930s.

Los Angeles fancied itself, even then, as the City of Tomorrow. Becket and partner Walter Wurdeman's winning competition entry for the 1935 Pan Pacific Auditorium captured the city's optimism and progressivism. The masterful Streamline Moderne composition was instantly popular. Its fluid pylons seemed a portal to the future. It was Becket's first iconic design.

With the end of World War II, the entire architectural profession realized that the face of the American city was about to change dramatically. No one yet knew exactly how.

But Wurdeman and Becket (renamed Welton Becket and Associates after Wurdeman died unexpectedly in 1949) set out to rethink almost every genre of urban architecture: shopping centers, work places, recreation venues, hospitals, housing, education, culture. On the way they reorganized the traditional architecture office to handle the increasingly large and complex projects that governments and developers demanded.

Their 1947 Bullocks Pasadena was one of the first department stores in the nation to step out of the traditional downtown and into suburbia. But the old, formal downtown department stores, modeled on palazzos, had to be reconfigured for the larger, open sites in lowrise suburbia, had to be restyled for its casual lifestyles, had to be reshaped to deal with the automobile. New forms followed new functions.

Mastering the Late Moderne style as they had the Pan Pacific's Streamline Moderne, Wurdeman and Becket oriented Bullocks' main entries to the auto parking terraces (elegantly landscaped by Ruth Shellhorn) in an innovative and fully realized design. Becket followed Bullock's Pasadena with a succession of shopping centers evolving the type: Stonestown in San Francisco, Bullocks Westwood and Northridge, Seibu (now the Peterson Automotive Museum), malls such as Del Amo and Fashion Island, and literally dozens of others across the continent.

The modern workplace? The Prudential Center on Wilshire, the General Petroleum building downtown, Capitol Records in Hollywood, Parker Center in the civic center explored different solutions to the need for flexibility in dynamic industries. They lead to Welton Becket office towers from Houston to Bartlesville to Oakland, for Ford, Kaiser, Phillips Petroleum and Equitable.

Americans began vacationing in droves in the 1950s, and Welton Becket (with Pereira, Luckman and Williams) designed the LAX jetport. Becket designed modern tourist towns at Canyon Village at Yellowstone for the National Park Service, Hawaiian Village in Honolulu for Henry J. Kaiser, and hotels at Walt Disney World in Orlando and Las Vegas.

Though he and Wurdeman began their partnership designing Tudor mansions for movie stars in the 1930s, they also helped to design the classic Ranch-style tract houses of Panorama City (idealized in their 1943 House of Tomorrow on Wilshire Blvd.) in 1950 for developers Fritz Burns and Henry Kaiser. As master planner for UCLA, Welton Becket Associates designed much of the extensive Medical Center, dormitories, the student center, many classroom buildings and Pauley Pavilion.

In the ultimate assertion of the multicentric city, Becket planned Century City, converting the old movie factory into a new type of downtown. To fulfil the cultural and recreational needs of the new city, he built the Memorial Sports Arena (where JFK was nominated for president in 1960), the Cinerama Dome, and finally the Music Center. Magnificently modern, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion's walls swell outward and its columns taper tautly as if responding to unseen forces within. Its self-confident, inventive ornament, and its cascading neo-baroque staircases express the assured opulence of American mid-century might.

The Music Center is a shopping center of culture. As a public space in the heart of downtown, the big boxes of the Chandler and Ahmanson linked by arcades, plazas and fountains mirror the shopping malls of the suburban metropolis. The similarity (seen also in Pereira's LA County Museum of Art) is hardly coincidental. Welton Becket was, after all, an architect who knew how to design successful shopping centers – the large public spaces and de facto town plazas of Southern Californians.

Like the Agora in ancient Athens, Les Halles in Paris, Fifth Avenue in New York, the buildings of the public marketplace have always been as important to great cities as cathedrals and palaces. Los Angeles architects adapted that urban constant to the twentieth century city of housing tracts, regional malls and freeways.

Becket played a significant role shaping the region and the era behind the scenes too. None proved more consequential than when he advised his friend and Holmby Hills neighbor Walt Disney to abandon an architect's design for his new amusement park in Anaheim. Design it yourself with your movie studio staff, architect Becket urged the movie maker. Given the impact of Disneyland in planning, suburbanization and culture, no advice more far-reaching was ever given in twentieth century architecture.

This brief list doesn't give full credit to Becket's entire work. Welton Becket and Associates spanned the global corporate culture (Hiltons in Havana, Cairo and Manila, office buildings and shopping centers from Newport Beach to New Jersey) before Becket died in 1969.

Yet for all the national and international scope of his work, Becket remained a Los Angeles architect. From the beginning of his career, he was designing the City of Tomorrow. He mastered the fundamental forces that shaped the twentieth century city: technology, commerce and popular culture. The high art Modernists who made it into the history books addressed the first issue successfully, but rarely the second and third. Without aspirations to high art, Becket responded to these urban forces with pragmatism and innovation. City leaders were in philosophical agreement with him; note that the Music Center patrons did not need to and did not choose to reach to New York or Europe to tap an architect of sufficient ability to conjure up a suitable landmark.

Today Los Angeles can begin to rediscover this complex, sometimes vexing, but undeniable part of the history that made us who we are. We can face Becket's faith in Los Angeles as we begin to see the interplay emerging between the 35-year-old Music Center and its new neighbor: Frank Gehry's Disney Hall doesn't rebuke or ignore the Music Center; its curves respond to and enhance it, creating a stronger unified cultural center atop Bunker Hill. This is a superb example of how new architecture can acknowledge our past (and our identity) as we move along new paths.

Growing from a two-man office into the largest in the world, prepared to handle any project of any size and any complexity, Becket's career rode the trajectory of twentieth century Los Angeles. Today, thirty five years after his death, Welton Becket's legacy is still inescapable as one cruises the region. His contributions have not faded. They have simply become so integral to the fabric of the city that we no longer notice them.

But we should. We cannot afford to take the buildings of Imperial California for granted. We cannot afford to deface a seminal landmark of suburbia like Bullocks Pasadena. In these buildings lie the key to the balances, the forces, the character, the urban rules – whether we approve of them or not – of our suburban metropolis. Architects must understand the tradition and legacy that lies behind the organic life of the city. In understanding them lies the workable solutions to the urban challenges of today.

Adapted from remarks delivered at "Built by Becket: Centennial Celebration", March 4, 2003, organized/hosted by the LA Conservancy Modern Committee, and previously published in the accompanying catalog / driving guide.

Alan Hess is the author of Palm Springs Weekend and the architecture critic for the San Jose Mercury News. His landmark books include Googie and Viva Las Vegas. He divides his time between Detroit and the San Francisco Bay Area.

westward transitions by daniel paul

The Early Development of the Late-Modern Glass Skin in the Collaborative Works of Cesar Pelli and Anthony Lumsden

In 1964, the large, multi-service, Los Angeles architectural firm of Daniel Mann Johnson, & Mendenhall (DMJM) hired Cesar Pelli as the first Director of Design in their 18-year history. Sensing the heavy workload at DMJM, Pelli immediately hired an Assistant: Anthony Lumsden. Both were hired from the Roche/ Dinkeloo office, formally that of Eero Saarinen until his premature 1961 passing. Mid-1960s Los Angeles, having no tradition of formal architectural criticism, easily allowed for both new experimentation, and rapid, cost efficient architecture. In answering to both, beginning in 1966 Pelli and Lumsden would create and refine the glass skin, an easily shaped, reversed mullion, continuous grid design system that would become a corporate vernacular in the western world throughout the 1970's, into the early 1980's. This article will focus upon their collaborative designs, which are the earliest works in the Late-Modern glass skin design system.

The Saarinen office had a penchant for glass designs that took the High-Modernist curtain wall in new directions. Of note among these is the Bell Labs project [figure 1 1956, 1962/1967, Holmdel, New Jersey] for which reflecting glass, which makes the glass skin possible in a practical sense, was first designed. This first solar performance glass was mirrored (which will become the skin of choice after the energy crisis), and was developed by Kinney Vacuum Coating of Detroit. [1] For his part, Anthony Lumsden had been the project designer on Bell Labs, and it was an idea of his to reverse the vertical mullions to form an exterior skin, an idea that was rejected at that time. [2]

The Los Angeles region had a prior history of employing glass in twentieth century architecture, as a means to simultaneously provide an aesthetics of Modernism and, particularly with the Modern residences, an integration into nature. The first of Pelli and Lumsden's glass designs was commissioned by Henry Singleton, who himself lived in a house designed by Richard Neutra. The commission was for the headquarters of the company Singleton had co-founded, Teledyne Labs. Reyner Banham would cite Pelli and Lumsden's structure [figure 2, 1966/1968, Northridge, CA] for continuing the "Case Study style that almost wasn't" [3] The Teledyne building features an 800-foot long, glazed two-story circulation spine that looked out into surrounding grapefruit groves. Taking a cue from Bell Labs, beginning in 1963, large glass companies Pittsburgh Plate Glass (PPG) and Libbey Owens Ford (L-O-F) began marketing heavily a new generation of vision and spandrel performance glasses. These reflecting glasses featured microscopic metallic oxides vacuum coated to the inner face of the outer lite of a double glazed unit. Teledyne employed the bronze tinted 'LHR' (light heat reflective) glazing units that PPG had introduced as their first solar performance glass. The benevolent climate of the region made the use and experimentation of these early performance glasses an easy option.

The mullion system on Teledyne, though not reversed, gave the horizontal and vertical mullions the same thin treatment, which approximated the idea of an early skin, and was called a 'continuous' mullion system in blueprints. [4] The fact that the vertical mullions were no longer predominant, combined with the non-loadbearing nature of the curtain wall, allowed for a new shaping of the exterior, and Teledyne features triangular protrusions called 'fingers' which provided a self-reflecting interplay upon the glass itself, and made possible easy expansion if necessary [figure 3].

Los Angeles in the mid-1960's was the global centerpoint for the aerospace and high-technology industries, and the Teledyne Corporation was but one of many such companies in the region. [5] With another of Pelli and Lumsden's 1966 designs, that for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) West Coast Headquarters [figure 4, 1966/1973, Hawthorne, CA] the new glass skin would further articulate an aesthetic translation of Los Angeles high-technology. A six-story rectangular-plan structure, the FAA design is a very early mirrored skin design, with reversed mullions that protrude out only 3/8 inch. The structure was designed within the context of the open space that the region still possessed in abundance in the mid-1960s; advantageous to reflecting glass designs that need not respond to the confines of infill building. The FAA building reflects the sky, dematerializing the building, and making it atmospheric in a way that symbolically references the client. The mirror glass skin, receding lower levels, and rounded corners of the FAA project all contributed to a new lightweight design. In discussing his later, late 60s/early 70s glass skin designs, Cesar Pelli would state his desire to make a fragile and fleeting architecture of volume over mass, more akin to "a flower, not a stone." [6] To Pelli, these intentions ran counter to those of the Modern monument, which he saw as being for the Gods or the state, but not for "today." [7]

Although Pelli and Lumsden initially designed the FAA to be completely enclosed in mirror glass, the technology did not exist at the time to fit glass around its tight, rounded corners, and aluminum was used instead. The combined affect of aluminum and mirror skin made reference to jet aircraft, to dirigibles, or in Lumsden's estimation, to an early streamlined trailer. [8] One writer referred to the FAA building as "the clearest statement of technological romanticism." [9]

A third 1966 design would fulfill one of Pelli and Lumsdenís primary aims with the glass skin - that of complete enclosure. The Century City Medical Plaza [figure 5, 1966/1969, Century City, CA] is comprised of a 19-story tower and 4-story hospital, that had three floors added in 1972. Upon its completion in 1969, the Century City Medical Plaza would become both the earliest designed and completed project to feature structures entirely enclosed in a skin of glass. [10] In enclosing the Medical Plaza tower within a continuous grid, the classical stacking prevalent on high-rises since Louis Sullivan was undone. The just-then prior LA high-rises were often pseudo-modern variations in the Miesian mode, and DMJM had initially brought Pelli in to help correct this. Pelli and Lumsden, by exaggerating the gridism of the Miesian language -- applying it over the tower in its entirety, end up undoing these elements of the High Modern language from the dogmatic codes with which they were loaded. In place of this, the Century City Medical Plaza tower acclimates itself to the Minimalist sculpture exemplified by Floor Four of the 1966 Whitney Biennial, of shaped sculptures possessing both architectural and anti-monumental qualities. Although the Century City Medical Plaza is still a box, the new skin enclosure, liberated from columnar references, leaves the box-form to be contemplated as the "object" that it is. [11] Pelli himself was fascinated by the interplay between the two-dimensional Cartesian grid across the three-dimensional object, and this continuous, all over gridism would be referred to by Lumsden as a "non-directional, non-gravitational" design system [figure 6]. [12]

Aesthetics aside, Pelli and Lumsden were working for DMJM, where good cost efficiency was a primary objective. Lumsden has stated that part of the reason why such thin mullions were used upon the Century City Medical Plaza was because the tight budget did not allow for more aluminum. [13] Just as with earlier glass curtain walls, the standardization of glazing units, with their relatively light-weight, reduced the purchase and construction costs. In the early 1960s the large glass companies switched to the float process of glass making, which greatly reduced labor costs on their part, and made the new performance glasses affordable. Of course, the new performance glass had great cost savings potential in regards to lower air conditioning costs. Century City Medical Plaza features a Graylite-type glazing unit that reads as black, and provides a greatly reduced daylight transmittance and lowered relative heat gain. The total cost of Century City Medical Plaza construction was $28.00 a square foot in 1969. [14]

Cesar Pelli would leave DMJM in 1968 to become the Design Director at Victor Gruen Associates, a post he held until the end of 1976. Upon Pelli's departure, Tony Lumsden became the Director of Design at DMJM, where he stayed until 1993, when he began his own practice. Both would continue the glass skin as their signature style throughout the early and mid-1970s. Both would employ high-tech imagery, and design for maximum cost efficiency. In different ways, both would also aim to humanize their buildings, and use the glass skin to do so. For Pelli, he would focus upon the multiple readings on one plane of perceptual transparency as a way to provide a more non-dual relationship between the building and the participant. [15] Lumsden would break apart the box using plan or section mutation with extrusion, allowing tenets to have 270-degree office views, whole elevations acclimated toward the Santa Monica Mountains, or just a new interior variety brought on by undulating curved walls. [16] Eventually, the glass-skin design system would go global. [17] Although LA has been called a global city, and it is logical that a global architecture would stem from it, something about the humanizing of high-rises seems nicely LA- centric as well.

Notes

[1] Kinney Vacuum, as a smaller glass company, did not have the production capability to glaze Bell Labs in its entirety in the new mirror glass until 1967. This same year, the Bell Labs building was expanded. Pamela Heyne, Today's Architectural Mirror: Interiors, Buildings and Solar Designs (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1982) 89-90.

[2] Anthony J. Lumsden, FAIA, telephone interview, 12 February 2003.

[3] Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (London: Penguin, 1971) 197.

[4] Teledyne Laboratories, blueprint viewing at DMJM+HN, Los Angeles, 1 July 2003.

[5] See Allen J. Scott, Technolpolis: High Tech Industry and Regional Development in Southern California (Berkley: University of California Press, 1997).

[6] Cesar Pelli, "Transparency: Physical and Perceptual," Architecture and Design (1975): 75-86.

[7] Cesar Pelli, "Recent Work of Cesar Pelli, Partner for Design, Gruen Associates, Los Angeles, California," (Los Angeles: promotional brochure, 1968).

[8] See David Morton, "Anti-Gravitational Mass," Progressive Architecture 57 7 (1976): 66-69.

[9] Arthur Golding, "The Big Offices," Derek Walker, ed., Los Angeles, Architectural Design Profile (New York: Academy Editions/ St. Martins Press, 1981): 89.

[10] Cesar Pelli, "Architectural Form and the Tradition of Building," Toshio Nakamura, ed. Extra Edition. Cesar Pelli (Tokyo: a+u, 1985) 26-32, and Michael Franklin Ross, "The Development of an Aesthetic System at DMJM," Architectural Record 5 (1975): 111.

[11] See Donald Judd, "Specific Objects," and Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood," found in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, ed. Art in Theory, 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).

[12] Ross, "The Development," 111.

[13] Lumsden, telephone interview, 12 February 2003.

[14] Pelli and Lumsden were remarkable at cost efficiency. With a series of Lumsden-designed Wilshire Blvd high-rises constructed between 1971 and 1974, the construction cost does not exceed $16.00/square foot. Pelliís Pacific Design Center blue building (1971/1975, West Hollywood, CA) cost 18 million to construct. The Pompidou Cultural Center (Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, 1971/1977, Paris) was constructed at roughly the same time and is close to the same size. Its construction, not including interiors, cost 80 million. Cesar Pelli interview in Barbaralee Diamondstein, American Architecture Now (New York: Rizolli, 1980) 179.

[15] Cesar Pelli's own late-60s/early 70s projects here referenced include the San Bernardino City Hall (1969/1972, San Bernardino, CA), and the Columbus Commons and Courthouse Center (1971/1973, Columbus, IN). Pelli has referenced the art of LA Minimalist Larry Bell, and his reflecting and tinted but transparent glass cube sculptures as influential on his own ideas regarding transparency. Esther McCoy, "Hi-Tech Images," Progressive Architecture, 2 (1974): 70. Pelli has cited the Columbus Commons and Courthouse Center as a prime example of perceptual transparency. Pelli, "Transparency," 80-82.

[16] The three Lumsden high-rises, mentioned earlier in the endnotes and referred to here in the main text are: One Park Plaza (1969/1971, Los Angeles), Century Bank (now the Petersen building) (1969/1972, Los Angeles), and Manufacturers Bank (1971/1974, Beverly Hills).

[17] Pelli's design for UN City (1969/unbuilt, Vienna), and Lumsden's Bumi Daya Bank design (1976/unbuilt, Jakarta, Indonesia) are early global examples of their own glass skin work. Pelli's Pacific Design Center may be out of scale with its immediate surroundings, but is not out of context with Los Angeles itself; Mario Gandelsonas called it a "new tool for mapping the global city." Mario Gandelsonas, "Conditions for a Colossal Architecture," Paul Goldberger, Mario Gandelsonas and John Pastier, Cesar Pelli: Buildings and Projects 1965-1990 (New York: Rizolli, 1990) 12. David Gebhard put forth the possibility of the glass skin as part of a new international sytle at "Four Days in April," a 1976 conference at UCLA which articulated the possibility and traits of a Los Angeles oriented "Silver" architecture. Peter Papademetriou, "Images for a Silver Screen," Progressive Architecture LXII 10 (1976): 70-73.

Daniel Paul just graduated from the California State University Northridge with a Masters Degree in Art History. Working under Merry Ovnick, his thesis was titled, "The Aesthetics of Efficiency: Contexts and the Early Development of Late-Modern Glass Skin Architecture." He is the Vice-Chairperson of the Los Angeles Conservancy Modern Committee, and is currently an Associate Historian with Design Aid Architects. He has also heavily researched art environments by the self-taught, and oversaw Grandma Prisbrey’s Bottle Village in Simi Valley for many years.

the well traveleds by tom marble

the well-traveleds

tom marble

1. In the hullabaloo surrounding proposed changes to the historic Huntington Hartford Gallery at Two Columbus Circle, Ada Louise Huxtable, longtime architectural critic for the New York Times, famously dismissed the Edward Durrell Stone landmark as possessing "dubious architectural distinction," both for the New York skyline as well as the career of the architect himself. I say, relax. I think it is a fantastic building, emblematic of a more innocent era, when people, even New Yorkers, didn't take themselves so seriously. As a cultural icon I am saddened by the proposed intervention by a lesser architect, as if Jackie O. were forced to wear a polyester jumpsuit from Ross-Dress-for-Less.

2. Some of the best buildings in Los Angeles are invisible to the local and national architectural press. Three works by Edward Durrell Stone are among them:

a. The Stuart Pharmaceutical building in Pasadena must have been amazing once, built at a time when it would have been in the middle of nowhere. Now, with the area built up around it and a Metro Gold Line stop behind it, the building seems to have been left to die. But imagine this sleek edifice in its day, adorned with the ubiquitous screens that Ms. Huxtable found so distasteful, with the Tommy Church designed hanging planters and vast reflecting pools in the foreground.

b. My wife and I were married at the Beckman Auditorium at Caltech, the first time ever that structure hosted a wedding. What I love about that building is its apparent lightness: it feels like a tent at the end of a grassy allee, but when you get up close you realize that is constructed of massive poured-in-place concrete. Other highlights include the shimmering fabric ceiling in the auditorium and the vaguely Moroccan light fixtures that dangle like earrings from the portico surrounding this circular building.

c. It was the lights surrounding the Ahmanson Center in Los Angeles that first drew me, as a driver, to this mid-Wilshire complex. Like the Wiltern Theater down the block, it is a strange and deeply imagined invention, one that is as remarkable for its level of detail as it is for its larger vision of a sort of modernist Campidoglio. This complex confirms the notion that not only was Mr. Stone a compelling architect, he was a skilled urban planner as well: I can think of no other gathering of buildings along the entire length of Wilshire that do as much formally as does the Ahmanson Center, yet matter as little. Such grand urban plans come off as totally irrelevant in Los Angeles; still, I welcome the enthusiasm of the gesture.

3. My grandfather's last act as a free man of was to walk into Perino's on Wilshire Boulevard and shoot up the place. He spent the rest of his life in a hospital in El Monte where, between electroshock therapy sessions, I apparently met him. I have no recollection of this, or of him at all; but I do know Perino's.

Paul Williams designed Perino's along with his many masterpieces throughout Southern California; he, with his contemporary Wallace Neff and a handful of others, were architects strong on the fundamentals of their profession: addressing issues of site, program, comfort, and structure to meet their clients' needs. However, unlike their Modernist contemporaries, they chose to add style to the mix, working predominately in the various traditional architectural languages popular at the time: French Norman, English Tudor, and most often in Los Angeles, Spanish Colonial.

Their contributions to local architectural history are often overlooked for the sin of superficiality; but even if these architects directed their talents solely upon the surface of things, they would not be alone in Los Angeles. As John Chase has argued persuasively in his books, Exterior Decorationand Glitter Stucco and Dumpster Diving, an entire phylum of architecture endemic to southern California derives from such artifice.

Chase traces the origin of Hollywood Regency origin to the design departments of movie studios around Hollywood. People like George Vernon Russell and Douglas Honnold were hired by studio bosses to design their personal estates and these young designers did not disappoint, bringing the skills honed over the production design of countless black and white movies to inject Technicolor drama into their personal lives.

4. Tony Duquette, who began his career as a window dresser for the major department stores along Wilshire Boulevard, took this a step further, shamelessly borrowing sources worldwide for effect. His West-Hollywood studio as well as his Westside home were both densely populated with amazing, rare museum pieces gathered in travels to South America, Africa, and Asia, objects that gave the homes he designed an immediate air of elegance and sophistication.

America in that era had a generally rosy and somewhat naive view of the world, an attitude that infected everything, including cultural production. Two specific phenomena distill this to its essence: the "Family of Man" exhibit at MOMA in the fifties, and the "It's a Small World" ride at Disneyland from the sixties. Both sought to celebrate the oneness of humanity, but they did so in far different ways.

Glitter and foamcore permeate Disneyland's "It's a Small World" ride which offered in 1968 a pastiche of images that appeared to be pulled directly from travel posters of the time, presenting international stereotypes as kid-friendly cartoons with an endless soundtrack. Contrast this with the "Family of Man" exhibit, curated by Edward Steichen, which more soberly depicted people worldwide in a variety of settings performing a range of activities and generally suggested that, beneath our obvious differences, we are all essentially the same.

5. In 1971, the artist Millard Sheets, known primarily for his intense watercolors, completed a tile mural entitled "Family of Man" at the entrance of what is now called City Hall East in Downtown Los Angeles. The mural still stands, but it is as darkened by inadequate lighting as it is by the bureaucratic indifference surrounding it.

But Sheets had a more pervasive and lasting effect on the built environment in his 40-plus designs of Home Savings branches around Southern California. Adorning simple travertine boxes with mosaics depicting local histories or other, more distant mythologies, Sheets was able to synthesize the often opposing forces of structure and ornament.

His studio in Claremont was perhaps the most thorough fusion, using the building as a canvas for explorations of material, color, and light; however, to the contemporary eye, the effect comes off as more superficial than substantial, more "It's a Small World" than "Family of Man;" yet, in the end, far more captivating than all the earnest modernism throughout that college town.

6. Artist Pae White and writer Med Bradbury together came up with a term to describe a certain type of condominium off Orange Grove in Pasadena. Mostly one-story, these courtyard dwellings are tucked away behind hedges of Oleander, Pittosporum, or Ligustrum and are accessible only to residents, guests, and the adventurous. The "Well-Traveleds" seem to have been fully colonized by grandparents of friends and mysterious others who have spent a lifetime roaming the world and filling their relatively modest abodes with artifacts too exotic and authentic have been purchased at Pier One Imports. Many of the Well-Traveleds were designed by local architectural phenom, Bob Ray Offenhauser.

Offenhauser is a minor character in John Chase's writings yet is almost single-handedly responsible for created a unique style which might be called Pasadena Regency. Sharing many of the characteristics of its more famous cousin in Hollywood, this variation relies more on scale and proportion than it does on surface treatment. Offenhauser's homes are immensely livable and are appreciated by their owners without a hint of irony. They provide an elegant if neutral backdrop against which an occupant can assert his or her own identity.

Even as well-traveled as Offenhauser may be personally, it is the client that has always been paramount; his buildings celebrate the owner and they do it in a clean, modernistic, and reverent way. Whereas the buildings of Edward Durrell Stone, Tony Duquette, and Millard Sheets sample world culture overtly and often simplistically, in a Bob Ray Offenhauser structure it is the client that is well-traveled.

7. When we as architects narrow our concern only to tectonics, to the physical nature of construction, we discharge ourselves of responsibility for what that building means to the neighborhood, the city, the society; when we ignore the emotional impact that our environment has on all of us, we further our own alienation.

We also miss out on a tremendous opportunity. Imagine: if we put our minds to it we could actually make buildings that matter to people other than ourselves. This is one of the lessons of the well-traveled Late-Moderns, why the work of Duquette, Sheets, and Offenhauser enchant us, and why Two Columbus Circle, Beckman Auditorium, and Perino's still hold sway: they connect us to history, to the rest of the world, to ourselves; and they do it in the most delightful way.

Tom Marble is a native Angeleno who studied architecture at UC Berkeley and Yale before working for a variety of firms throughout Southern California. Over the last ten years he has designed buildings, planned communities, written screenplays, and created public art - all part of an ongoing project that explores how architects and urban thinkers help form the urban mythology of a place like Los Angeles, and how that mythology in turn forms and informs their work in that city. Tom opened his own architecture and urban design practice in July 2001.

about the contributors

Daniel Herman is an architect in Los Angeles. He is currently a project architect at DMJM. He has previously worked in the offices of Frederick Fisher in LA and SOM in New York. He also maintains a small independent practice, Chung/Herman,, with his partner Linda Chung. He is a regular contributor on architecture for Artforum and has written for Architecture, Interiors, Metropolis, and ArtByte. He contributed seven essays to the Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (Taschen, 2001), including "Three-Ring Circus," "Jerde Transfer," "High Architecture" and "Mall."

Alan Hess is the author of Palm Springs Weekend and the architecture critic for the San Jose Mercury News. His landmark books include Googie and Viva Las Vegas. He divides his time between Detroit and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Scott Johnson is a prolific designer of residential, commercial and institutional building projects, including three high rise buildings in Century City, California; the Opus One and Byron Wineries in the Napa Valley and Santa Barbara County, respectively; Rincon Center in San Francisco; and the new Capitol Area East End in Sacramento. Johnson worked at The Architects Collaborative in Cambridge, Mass, the Los Angeles and San Francisco offices of Skidmore Owings Merrill and the office of Philip Johnson and John Burgee in New York City. Joining Pereira Associates in Los Angeles in 1983 as Principal and Design Director, he and William Fain acquired the firm now known as Johnson Fain in 1987. In addition to designing nearly 100 built projects in the past 16 years, Johnson has also taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, the USC School of Architecture, and the UCLA School of Art and Architecture. Active in the arts community, he is a Founder of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and serves as a board director of the Collage Dance Theater, the Craft and Folk Art Museum, and a member of MOCA’s Drawings Committee.

Tom Marble is a native Angeleno who studied architecture at UC Berkeley and Yale before working for a variety of firms throughout Southern California. Over the last ten years he has designed buildings, planned communities, written screenplays, and created public art - all part of an ongoing project that explores how architects and urban thinkers help form the urban mythology of a place like Los Angeles, and how that mythology in turn forms and informs their work in that city. Tom opened his own architecture and urban design practice in July 2001.

Daniel Paul just graduated from the California State University Northridge with a Masters Degree in Art History. Working under Merry Ovnick, his thesis was titled, "The Aesthetics of Efficiency: Contexts and the Early Development of Late-Modern Glass Skin Architecture." He is the Vice-Chairperson of the Los Angeles Conservancy Modern Committee, and is currently an Associate Historian with Design Aid Architects. He has also heavily researched art environments by the self-taught, and oversaw Grandma Prisbrey’s Bottle Village in Simi Valley for many years.

Kazys Varnelis received his Ph.D. in the History of Architecture and Urbanism from Cornell University in 1994, and has taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He has lectured in numerous venues in both North America and Europe and his work has been published widely both in the US and abroad. With Robert Sumrell, he founded AUDC, an architectural research collaborative in 2001. His teaching and research focuses on late modernism, architecture and capitalism, and the impact of recent changes in telecommunications and demographics on the contemporary city in general and on Los Angeles in particular. He is editing Simultaneous Environments, a book on contemporary architecture and urbanism in Los Angeles.