Psychoanalytic Building | Los Angeles Conservancy
Photo courtesy Architectural Resources Group

Psychoanalytic Building

The Psychoanalytic Building at 1800 Fairburn Avenue near Century City is not one of Charles Moore’s more attention-grabbing buildings, appearing to be just another small stucco office building like thousands of others in Los Angeles. But it is a little gem of Late Modern architecture that reveals itself once you take an oblique look at its entrance.

Designed by Moore with partner William Turnbull, this two-story office building was completed in 1971 expressly for use by psychologists and psychiatrists, and the same type of tenants exist to this day. It is L-shaped, and both street-facing façades have private balconies that lend the building a more condominium-like than office-like feel.

The building’s entrance is somewhat like a stage or film set, with a short stairway leading up and under a sort of false front: two parallel stucco walls with square “window” cut-outs. These independent stucco walls are a trademark feature of Moore’s work, manifested in other designs like the faculty club at UC Santa Barbara and the Moore-Rogger-Hofflander condominium building, just a few blocks away.

In the Psychoanalytic Building, the walls rearrange conventional spaces to make entering the building an unexpected experience, heightened by the covered interior courtyard into which the walls lead.

Photo from Conservancy archives

Walter P. Story Building

A Beaux Arts beauty built in 1909 on a lot purchased by a Montana cattleman who also financed half of the building's million-dollar construction.
Photo by M. Rosalind Sagara/L.A. Conservancy

Silver Dollar Café

The death of Ruben Salazar at the Silver Dollar marked a turning point in the Chicano civil rights movement.
Photo by Michael Locke

Museum of Contemporary Art

With only four of its seven floors above street level, its sunken, red sandstone-clad design is a welcome contrast to the extreme heights of the Bunker Hill glass-and-steel high rise towers.