Innovations in Technology | Los Angeles Conservancy
Photo by Larry Underhill

Technology played a huge role in virtually every example of Modern architecture in Los Angeles.

Postwar L.A. was the right place and the right time for new technologies to usher in a wave of experimentation and innovation in terms of building design, construction, engineering, materials, and purpose.

The war had brought a number of high-tech businesses to town and had produced an unprecedented era of invention and new materials that architects applied to their work.

The Case Study House program is a prime example of how technology affected architecture, with architects taking on the challenge of designing and building inexpensive and efficient homes using “war-born techniques and materials” (Arts+Architecture, Jan. 1945).

Master-planned, large-scale suburban communities featured new materials and processes including “total design” –- designing, producing, and assembling homes on site, from the ground up.

And of course, the glass-skinned architecture of corporate Los Angeles would not exist without innovation in materials and construction.

Photo courtesy Architectural Resources Group

100 Wilshire

DMJM
More than just an entertainer, Lawrence Welk was also a canny developer who put his mark on Santa Monica with the Champagne Towers apartment complex and the General Telephone high-rise office tower.
Photo courtesy Architectural Resources Group

6500 Wilshire

I. M. Pei
Luckman Partnership
Cadillac Fairview hired architects I. M. Pei and the Luckman Partnership to design its flagship building, apparently sparing no expense in either construction or materials.
Photo by Gary Leonard/Los Angeles Public Library

777 Tower

Cesar Pelli
One of downtown's most graceful high-rise office buildings, the 777 Tower designed by Cesar Pelli effortlessly pierces the downtown skyline with subtle articulation and detail.
Photo courtesy Architectural Resources Group

Air and Space Gallery, California Science Center

Frank Gehry
Architect Frank Gehry's first major public work celebrates California's history in the aviation and aerospace industries with an ingenious use of space and light, an allusion to the challenges of aerospace design.
Glendale Federal Savings, Beverly Hills
Photo by Lynne Tucker

Bank of America, Beverly Hills

Langdon & Wilson
Visitors looking up from the base of the Glendale Federal Savings Building see light streaming through the fifty-two rainbow-patterned glass of a dalle da verre cornice, cantilevered nine-and-a-half feet from the top of the ten-story building.
Photo courtesy Architectural Resources Group

Boat Houses

Harry Gesner
These miniscule (by today's standards) homes are clad in warm wood with angled ceilings, built-in furniture and glass facades giving Harry Gesner's "boat houses" their name.
Photo courtesy www.you-are-here.com

Braille Institute of America

William L. Pereira & Associates
To address the unique challenge of designing a building for people who would experience a building without ever seeing it, architects Yohannan and Miranda began their process by wearing blindfolds for two weeks.
Photo by Adrian Scott Fine/L.A. Conservancy

Capitol Records Tower

Welton Becket & Associates
The world's first circular office building and one of L.A.'s most iconic buildings, an important illustration of the evolving work of Welton Becket and Associates during the 1950s.
Photo courtesy Architectural Resources Group

Century City Medical Plaza

Cesar Pelli
DMJM
Anthony Lumsden
Architectually elegant, economical and eco-friendly decades before it was in vogue, the Century City Medical Plaza would serve as a benchmark for corporate architecture for years after its completion.
Great Western Savings
Photo courtesy Architectural Resources Group

Chase Bank, Gardena

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
Completed in 1961, the building was the prototype for all other Great Western Savings buildings and boasted an all-concrete design and walls made entirely of glass.
Photo by Michael Locke

Cinerama Dome

Welton Becket & Associates
Of all the vintage theatres in L.A., none stand out quite like the Cinerama Dome, a very rare example of an intact Cinerama theatre and the first concrete geodesic dome in the world.
Eames House and Studio (Case Study House #8)
Photo courtesy Architectural Resources Group

Eames House and Studio (Case Study House #8)

Charles and Ray Eames
One of the most famous Mid-Century Modern buildings in Los Angeles, designed by its owners, legendary designers Charles and Ray Eames, as two simple boxes that reflect the Eames' love of industrial design and materials.

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Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. - An Initiative of the Getty

Curating the City: Modern Architecture in L.A. is part of Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. This collaboration, initiated by the Getty, brings together seventeen cultural institutions from April through July 2013 for a wide-ranging look at the postwar built environment of the city as a whole, from its famous residential architecture to its vast freeway network, revealing the city’s development and ongoing impact in new ways. Major support for this project has been provided by the Getty Foundation. pacificstandardtimepresents.org.