Inglewood Civic Center | Los Angeles Conservancy
Inglewood Civic Center
Photo courtesy Architectural Resources Group

Inglewood Civic Center

Inglewood's twenty-nine-acre Civic Center contains its City Hall, main library, a fire station, a police facility, a parking garage, and a public health complex in a square bounded by La Brea Avenue, Florence Avenue, Manchester Boulevard, and Fir Avenue. Completed in 1973, the Civic Center was designed by Charles Luckman Associates to revitalize Inglewood's civic and business district. Its plan aimed to increase mobility in the area for both pedestrians and cars, and create landscaped open space in the heart of the city.

The complex's most impressive buildings are its eight-story City Hall, standing atop a wide, two-story base, and its four-level library building, which is supported on tall columns. Both are Brutalist in style, with their monumental concrete bulks serving as both structure and ornamentation. The library includes an interesting mural-in-concrete called The Written Word, created by sculptor Tom Van Sant and looking like modern rock art images rising up a tall column.

All of the buildings are tied together by a landscape designed by landscape architect Robert Herrick Carter. It features expansive green spaces and multiple pedestrian malls and bridges, including elevated walkways that help facilitate foot traffic. Inglewood's Civic Center is a successful rethinking of the city's governmental core, combining a verdant landscape with monumental concrete buildings to create a flowing and vibrant urban center.

Photo courtesy Architectural Resources Group

Santa Fe Springs Civic Center

Renowned architect and planner William L. Pereira designed the civic heart Santa Fe Springs, creating a grouping of one-story concrete block buildings carefully sited in a landscape that harmoniously combines alleés of trees, lush plantings, and paved plazas and walkways.
Zenith Tower
Photo by Devri Richmond

Zenith Tower

A distinctive Late Modern building that deserves a second look, Zenith Tower's architect, Maxwell Starkman, was one of the first combination architect-developers which put methods of production on equal footing with pure design.
Photo by J. Eric Lynxwiler

St. Basil Catholic Church

St. Basil Catholic Church rises from the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Kingsley Drive like an ancient fortress, girded with towers and bristling with jagged, three-dimensional windows of stained glass and iron.