THE MAGNIFICENT BUILDINGS OF LOS ANGELES

We often desCrIBe as an eclectic publication, and, in that way, it is a lot like the architecture of Los Angeles. Some cities have a particular architectural identity but this one has many. There was the American Craftsman style, then Beaux-Arts and Spanish Colonial Revival and Mayan Revival, and then Art Deco arrived and proliferated during the many years that movie studios became the cornerstone of an economy that had previously relied primarily on oil.

/01/ U.S. Bank Tower, known locally as the Library Tower and formerly as the First Interstate Bank World Center, is a 1,018-foot skyscraper in downtown LA. It is the third-tallest building in California, the second-tallest building in Los Angeles, the eighteenth-tallest in the United States, the third-tallest west of the Mississippi River after the Salesforce Tower (in San Francisco) and the Wilshire Grand Center (below), and the 129th-tallest building in the world. .) It was designed (by Henry N. Cobb of the architectural firm Pei Cobb Freed & Partners) to resist an earthquake of 8.3 on the Richter scale.

/02/ Completed in 2017, Wilshire Grand Center is the tallest building in the U.S. west of Chicago. (At 1,100 feet, it is taller than the U.S. Bank Tower [#1 above] by 82 feet.). It is a mixed-use hotel, retail, observation decks, shopping mall, and office complex with 67,000 sf of retail, 677,000 sf of Class

A office space, and the 889-room InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown, with the tallest open-air bar in the Western Hemisphere.

/03/ Los Angeles Union Station (LAUS) is the main railway station in Los Angeles and the largest railroad passenger terminal in the Western United States. Built in the 1930s, it combines Art Deco, Mission Revival, and Streamline Moderne styles. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 and today is by far the busiest train station in the Western United States.

/04/ Also from the 1930s is the Title Guarantee and Trust Company Building designed by the father-son architectural team of John B. and Donald Parkinson.

/05/ The Richard J. Riordan Central Library (a/k/a the Los Angeles Central Library) is both a leading public research library and a major architectural landmark. Comprised of the original 1926 library (now called the Goodhue Building) and a 1993 addition (named for former mayor Tom Bradley) it has been designated a Los Angeles Historic Cultural Monument and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. It was the last project of New York architect Bertram Goodhue, and the most innovative work of his career.

/06/ The Art Deco Los Angeles City Hall, completed in 1928, is the center of the government of the city.Its distinctive tower shows the influence of the Los Angeles Public Library (#05 above), completed shortly before this structure was begun. An image of City Hall has been on Los Angeles Police Department badges since 1940. Interestingly, to keep the city's architecture harmonious, prior to the late 1950s the Charter of the City of Los Angeles did not permit any portion of any building other than a purely decorative tower to be more than 150 ft, so, from 1928 until 1964, City Hall was the tallest building in Los Angeles.

At work, the authority of a person is inversely proportional to the number of pens that person is carrying.

/07/ Opened in 2003, Walt Disney Concert Hall is the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Designed by architect Frank Gehry, it is an internationally recognized architectural landmark and one of the most acoustically sophisticated concert halls in the world.

/08/ Built in 1969, and a paradigm of brutalist architecture, Saint Basil Catholic Church, according to its designer Albert C. Martin, is “a marriage of early Christian with contemporary to recall the time when the church often served as a place of refuge. It is devoid of external embellishments as early churches were, but it is not a carbon copy of early churches. It at one time retains the feeling of the past and present."

/09/The Pacific Design Center, designed by Cesar Pelli, adds color to Hollywood. It was completed in 2013 and is open to design professionals only (e.g., designers, architects). It represents over 2,000 leading manufacturers dedicated to the best in residential and business interior furnishings, educational opportunities, and resource information.

/10/ The Coca-Cola Building is a bottling plant modeled as a Streamline Moderne building designed by architect Robert V. Derrah with the appearance of a ship with portholes, catwalk and a bridge from five existing industrial buildings in 1939. It was designated Los Angeles HistoricCultural Monument in 1975.

/11/ The Westin Bonaventure Hotel and Suites is a 367-foot, 33-story hotel constructed between 1974 and 1976. Designed by architect John C. Portman Jr., The futuristic hotel is the largest hotel in the city and the top floor has a revolving restaurant and bar.

/12/ The Getty Center is a campus of the Getty Museum, the Getty Research Institute, the Getty Conservation Institute, the Getty Foundation, and the J. Paul Getty Trust. IT opened to the public in 1997 and is known for its architecture, gardens, and views overlooking Los Angeles. Designed by architect Richard Meier, the campus (draws 1.8 million visitors annually) also included special provisions to address concerns regarding earthquakes and fires.

/13/ The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels opened in 2002. The center of the Roman Catholic dioces, there was considerable controversy over both its deconstructivist and modern design, and the costs incurred in its construction and furnishing, as well as the decision to build a crypt under the cathedral.

/14/ The Chemosphere is a modernist house designed by John Lautner in 1960. The building, which the Encyclopædia Britannica once called "the most modern home built in the world" is admired both for the ingenuity of its solution to the problem of the site and for its unique octagonal design. Since 1998, it has been the Los Angeles home of Benedikt Taschen, of the German publishing house Taschen, who has had the house restored.

/15/ Grauman's Chinese Theatre is a movie palace on the historic Hollywood Walk of Fame. The original theatre was commissioned following the success of the nearby Grauman's Egyptian Theatre. Both are in Exotic Revival style architecture, and both were built by a partnership headed by Sid Grauman between 1926-1927. Among the theatre's features are the concrete blocks in the forecourt, which bear the signatures, footprints, and handprints of popular motion picture personalities from the 1920s to the present day. Originally named Grauman's Chinese Theatre, it was renamed Mann's Chinese Theatre in 1973; that name lasted until 2001, after which it reverted to its original name. In 2013, Chinese electronics manufacturer TCL Corporation purchased the facility's naming rights (and it is now known as TCL Chinese Theatre.) n

It seemed so romantIC — and now so long ago — when Morgan Darnell courted Sara in Tennessee, finally convincing her they should marry and (in 1856) join a wagon train traveling along the “Trail of Tears,” through Indian territory, and across the Red River into Texas. In a twist of fate, Sara arrived in Dallas a 19-yearold widow, armed with plenty of pluck, and determined to open