Total voters: 847
Introduction
Los Angeles is home to architecture that is wacky and wonderful, artful and edgy. Buildings bursting with post World War II exuberance nestle against mid-century modern drive-ins, Italianate libraries, avant-garde edifices and homes that could double as castles.
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Photo: Corrected photo courtesy of Dominguez Rancho Adobe Museum
California can almost trace its modern history — as a territory of Spain, then Mexico, and finally as part of the United States — through the family founded by Spanish soldier Juan Jose Dominguez. The 75,000 acres of Rancho San Pedro, gifted to Dominguez in 1784 by Spain, covered most of what today is Compton and stretched to the Palos Verdes Peninsula. His heir and nephew, Don Manuel, built this lovely adobe home for his bride in 1826. Situated on a hilltop in what is now Rancho Dominguez, this “Mission” or “Spanish Colonial” look became the signature style of Southern California and has influenced the design of countless homes and public structures. Its genius lies in the artful use of simple, locally made materials such as fired mud bricks, whitewashed stucco, and curved clay roof tiles. Moreover, the style is sustainable, providing excellent insulation and naturally cool or warm spaces as the seasons change. Don Manuel Dominguez lived California’s metamorphosis, holding positions under both Mexican and U.S. governments: he served as (Alcade) Mayor of Los Angeles, a judge, and Los Angeles County Supervisor. He also was one of 47 delegates to sign the new state’s constitution. One hundred and eighty-six years later, Don Manuel’s home is a museum. Its grounds are often used for parties, weddings, and other celebrations that entwine both the Dominguez family and California’s historic past with the lives of residents today.
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Photo: Adam Janeiro
The opulent rooms of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library are a bibliophile’s dream. Home to one of the most comprehensive rare book and manuscript collections in the United States, the Italian Renaissance building was designed by Robert Farquhar (who also designed Beverly Hills High School) and built in 1924 to house the personal collection of philanthropist William Andrews Clark, Jr. The library was named to honor Clark’s father, a Montana copper baron and U.S. Senator. Special touches reflect the family’s history: bookcases in the reading rooms, for example, are made of copper. With a particular focus on 17th and 18th Century English literature, the collection includes works by or about luminaries such as John Milton, Henry Fielding and Jonathan Swift. The Clark is also home to the world’s most extensive collections of works by or about Oscar Wilde. The library hosts poetry readings, concerts, lectures and special events in its drawing room, where murals depicting scenes from All For Love, English poet John Dryden’s retelling of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, grace the walls.
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Photo: Wikipedia
When the Dunbar Hotel, opened in 1928, it was the center of African-American culture in Los Angeles. Originally called the Hotel Somerville, it was built entirely by black contractors, laborers and craftsmen, and financed by black Angelenos. It was the only hotel in Los Angeles that welcomed black guests and as such, hosted many of the era’s legendary entertainers, politicians and civic leaders. Stars of the Jazz age, such as Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, stayed there and then played next door at the famed Club Alabam. The hotel was renamed the Dunbar in 1929, in honor of legendary poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, and was designated a historic-cultural landmark in 1974. It is currently under renovation by local developer Tom Safran. Upon completion, the new building will provide affordable housing for senior citizens.
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Photo: Wikipedia
Home to 200 varieties of roses and 20,000 bushes, the seven acres of the sunken rose garden in Exposition Park are a serene and exquisite oasis in Los Angeles’ urban core. Its beauty makes it a popular backdrop for summer weddings, and no hint lingers of its earthier turn-of-the-century past when gamblers gathered to bet on dog, camel and horse races. Why is a garden on our list? In Southern California our outdoor spaces — patios, decks, balconies and even rusty old fire escapes just large enough for a grill — are extensions of our homes. Just as a superbly designed building is the imaginative but practical organization and use of space, so too is a well-planned, and in this case, beautiful, fragrant, and blooming outdoor rose garden.
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Photo: Martin Zamora
The Angelus Funeral Home, designed by noted African-American architect Paul R. Williams, incorporates neo-classical and Art Deco elements often seen in Williams’ work. Williams’ talent was evident early on; he designed buildings while still a student at the University of Southern California School of Engineering and opened his own architecture office at age 25. He designed more than 2,000 homes in Los Angeles, but is perhaps most noted for the swank residences he created for Hollywood stars, including Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Lon Chaney and Frank Sinatra. Among his public projects are the Beverly Hills Hotel, Hollywood YMCA and Los Angeles County Courthouse. Founded in 1923, Angelus Funeral Home was the first black-owned business incorporated in California. The name refers to the Christian devotion, taken from the Latin, Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariæ, meaning “The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary.”
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Photo: Thinkstock.com
“Why I build it? I can’t tell you. Why a man make the pants? Why a man make the shoes?”
– Sculptor Simon Rodia
Was he genius? A madman? A little of both? (Sabato) Simon Rodia, who was born in 1879 in Italy and who emigrated to the United States at age 15, always refused to explain his labor of love. Built over the span of 33 years, the Watts towers are actually 17 dazzling structures composed of steel piles and rods wrapped with wire mesh, coated with mortar are inlaid with broken glass, sea shells, and tile collected by Rodia and neighborhood children. Almost as soon as they began to take shape, however, the towers became controversial. Vandals targeted them relentlessly, and in the 1960s, the City of Los Angeles attempted to have them torn down. Today they are widely recognized as masterpieces of ingenuity and engineering. According to a documentary about the one-time bricklayer, Rodia was in part inspired by the most famous tower in his homeland, the leaning tower of Pisa, where Galileo Galileo dropped two balls in his famous experiment on acceleration. “My God, I say, I’m going to make a tower different than Galileo,” Rodia once remarked. In the historic two-square mile neighborhood from which the towers take their name, that’s exactly what he did.
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Randy’s Photo: Thomas Hawk (thomashawk.com) Dale’s Photo: Phil Pasquini
Los Angeles loves donuts: hot Krispy Kremes, towering strawberry donuts, beignets, gut-busting maple-bacon donuts, Danish aebelskiver (apple fritters), and even newfangled red velvet concoctions. Best donut lists and contests are eternal internet favorites, and there is even L.A. art commemorating the donut experience, such as Jennifer Rubell’s donut wall at LACMA. Greater Los Angeles is arguably the donut capital of the world. Although aficionados debate which ones are best, few deny that the region’s most iconic donuts are the towering rings above Randy’s and Dale’s donut shops. Built in 1952 and designed by Henry J. Goodwin, Randy’s Donuts was a part of the BigDoNut drive-through chain and is an example of semaphore architecture, in which buildings visually signal their purpose. For decades, these landmarks have grabbed motorists’ attention in our fast-moving automobile culture, and Randy’s has been featured in movies including Earth Girls Are Easy, Coming to America and Iron Man 2.
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Photo: Pann’s Catering website (www.pannscatering.com)
It’s 1958: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration launches Explorer 1 and the space race is on. Drive-in movies are in their heyday, and a group soon to be known as the Beatles has its first recording session. Ed Sullivan and Elvis are in, and the average cost of a house is $12,750. That same year, Greek immigrants George and Rena Panagopoulos open Pann’s Restaurant and Coffee Shop in Inglewood. Some love Pann’s for the food and others the hospitality, but it’s the restaurant’s optimistic architecture that lands it on our list. Googie architecture – the name comes from a now defunct coffee shop in West Hollywood – was popular from the late 1940s to the mid 1960s, when futuristic motifs were the rage. Pann’s was designed by architects Eldon Davis and Helen Liu Fong, and, more than 50 years later, the large windows and tropical landscaping give the site a classic coffee shop look and feel. The restaurant continues to attract a devoted following and has also been featured in hit films such as Pulp Fiction.
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Photo: Google Maps
The flowing sweep of the freeway interchange between Highways 10 and 405 in West Los Angeles is an architectural triumph. One of the largest man-made structures in the region, it is also one of the most elegant — a true work of art. Practical, simple and highly sophisticated in its design, like much of the architecture that we use in our daily lives it often goes unnoticed. What further distinguishes this immense structure is that its designer, Marilyn Jorgenson Reece, was the first woman to break the gender barrier in highway design. Including this representative from the road system in our list of heritage highlights seems natural to us. Not only does it underscore the importance of the freeway system in fostering Los Angeles’ rapid growth and suburbanization after the Second World War, it also pays homage to the fundamental importance of mobility in our unique urban character… and let’s face it, we live on freeways.
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Photo: Gary Leonard
Can anyone just walk by a Thom Mayne building without stopping to stare and wonder? The Pritzker Prize-winning architect is respected as one of the world’s most aggressively original designers, and the Dr. Theodore Alexander, Jr. Science Center School illustrates why. Built in 2004, a steel-framed lattice addition is attached to the original 1926 cast concrete and brick armory structure. The two story, steel-framed addition contains 20 classrooms, and the main floor supports an 8,400 square-foot garden on its top deck. If you ever pass the intersection of Exposition Park Boulevard and Figueroa Street, you will see Mayne’s linear structure of gridded lattices, bridges and stair extensions pushing upward toward the intersection. The building challenges the eye the way science challenges the mind, inviting students indoors and observers outside to go forth into unexplored territory, always asking: Why? How? What next?
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Photo: Floyd B. Bariscale
Sir Thomas More published the book Utopia in 1516 and simultaneously gave birth to the enduring quest for the perfect place to dwell. Yes, that’s an exaggeration. The concept of the ideal city far predates More. In antiquity, mighty capitals often were constructed to align with the stars: Machu Picchu, ancient Persepolis and Peru’s Cuzco. So how does Village Green fit into this grand lineage? It too, has utopian aspirations. When construction began in 1941, the former Baldwin Hills Village was one of the most ambitious urban planning projects of its day. The goal was to do the remarkable: balance the tensions between nature and development, privacy and community, individuality and interconnected living. Today. the gardens, parks and courtyards of the condominium complex provide an oasis of greenery and calm in the heart of L.A.’s metropolis, and in contrast to architecture that clamors for notice, the buildings of Village Green almost slide off the eye. Even better, the design minimizes visual evidence of cars — it’s as if the architects knew Angelenos would one day grow to depend on (and therefore to resent) automobiles. Critic Lewis Mumford once said of the neighborhood, “Here every part of the design speaks the same robust vernacular: simple, direct, intelligible.” We couldn’t have said it better.
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Photo: Lazlo Regos courtesy of Wilshire Boulevard Temple
Hirsz, Aaron, Szmul and Itzhak Wonskolaser – better known in Hollywood as Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack Warner, or simply, the Warner Brothers, catapulted the film world out of the silent movie era into the talkies with The Jazz Singer. One of the Warners’ lasting gifts to Los Angeles, however, is not on film, but on the walls of the grand and graceful Wilshire Boulevard Temple. The Temple, erected in 1929, is masterpiece inside and out. This photograph shows the building as it is most familiar to passersby, with its beautiful Byzantine dome. Inside is another artistic glory. Commissioned by Warner Bros. studio head Jack Warner and painted by artist Hugo Ballins, murals depicting the journey of Jewish people from biblical times to their arrival in the United States, ring the sanctuary. Such depictions, even in a reform temple, were rare at the time, due to a strict interpretation of the Second Commandment’s prohibition against graven idols. Currently, the building, including the murals, is under renovation with an expected completion date some time next year. After that, the Warner Memorial Murals, 320-foot long and 7-foot tall, will once again be on view — a spiritual silent movie telling the story of a people.
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Photo: Floyd B. Bariscale
USC Widney House by Dan Rosenfeld
The 20 years between 1860 and 1880 were transformative for Los Angeles. The city’s Wild West character was rapidly evolving – civilizing, if you will. The population swelled from 4,400 to 11,000 people; L.A. was connected to San Francisco by railroad in 1876, and four years later the University of Southern California was founded. Stately Widney Hall, now Widney Alumni House, was the newborn institution’s only building, accommodating 53 students and 10 faculty members. For many Angelinos (except maybe Bruins fans) the building is almost as iconic as Tommy Trojan, and over the decades, it has been remodeled, renovated and even relocated several times. Today USC enrolls about 37,000 students annually and has more international students than any university in the nation. Nonetheless, the school also has fostered vigorous community partnerships and programs that support and engage its neighborhood. The Widney’s graceful lines and simple design are a visual testament to USC’s commitment to Los Angeles and its own past, even as its vision is now focused on the future.
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John Kurtz Mar 2 2012 - 12:26 am
The photo of the Clark is great but I do believe it is in a reverse image.
Regardless this is still my favorite LAHCM in LA!
John Kurtz
Carol Sandberg Mar 8 2012 - 6:23 pm
My favorite, too. Too bad more people don’t know about it.
Joe McGuckin Mar 8 2012 - 4:43 am
Pann’s in Pulp Fiction? I don’t think so.
The diner scenes were filmed at the Hawthorne Grill (now demolished) in Hawthorne…
Jimmie Woods Gray Mar 8 2012 - 7:47 pm
I’d like to see Golden State Life Insurance Building, At Western and Adams Blvd., saved for the community.
Michael Banner Mar 15 2012 - 2:04 pm
I grew up in Watts and can remember playing on the Tower as a young boy. I was fortunate enough to leave Watts and attend Loyola and I have been a resident of Westchester for the past 40 years. Panns is a neighborhood (community) institution and my favorite on the list. Wow! The 2nd District has many treasures. When will we redistrict these landmarks away?