Figural-Architectural Sculpture

Los Angeles Deco

 

 

The design of the Los Angeles Public Library triggered something, and the city was growing enormously in the late 1920's, providing lots of terminal piers and limestone walls to carve people into. As a reference point, Frank Lloyd Wright was constructing his vaguely Mesoamerican Hollyhock House, dating from 1921 or so. The only reason I bring that up, both are products of a general fascination with exoticism, a boom economy, and a feeling that the climate would allow for experimentation.

Integrated figural architectural sculpture in Los Angeles counts as its own subgenre. It's a measure of the popularity & influence of Goodhue's library that at least another eight other major Angelean buildings constructed between 1927 and 1935 feature the same technique. Seven of those eight are still standing.

Three examples with photographs below: the Elk's Lodge from 1927. I never understood if this was a commercial building or if this iconography has any meaning whatsoever.

The figures on the Atlantic Richfield Oil Building tip over into being sinister, or Expressionistic, with those doomed joker-aviators perpetually about to leap off, and that strange screen for the display of four alternate designs for the Metropolis robot.

And the Fine Arts Building, both ridiculous (for its look) and sad (for its narrative).

Other examples not represented below:

the 1929 Pantages Hollywood Theatre, architect B. Marcus Priteca

the 1929 Pacific Coast Stock Exchange Building, architect Samuel E. Lunden (which Charles Moore singles out for praise)

the 1930 National Bank of Commerce Building, Walker & Eisen architects

the 1935 Los Angeles Times Building by Gordon B. Kaufmann, which has three Merrell Gage figures dating from 1935, and five more figures by Harry D. Donato dating from the 1948 expansion

and the 1928 Mayer Investments Building at Hollywood and Western, the building that housed the Will Hays censorship office, and MGM's Central Casting, among other offices. Maggie Valentine's book about the theatre architect S. Lee Charles ("The Show Starts on the Sidewalk") says, "The Lee Lawrie-esque cast-stone figures across the top of the facade represented the arts of the motion picture industry: music, drama, literature, architecture, and the motion picture director. The larger figures looming over them were the producers. In the keystone over the entry was a cast-stone figure denoting business, executed by Carlo Garrone after a design by Lee."

 

Park Plaza Hotel / Elk's Lodge

MacArthur Park, Los Angeles

1927

 

 

Beloved as the scene of the rooftop roughing-the-witness scene in Tango and Cash, the Egyptoid 1927 Park Plaza Hotel stands at 607 South Park View, right on MacArthur Park. And yes it was originally built to serve the Elks BPOE #99. Along with the figurative sculpture, including guardian angels on nearly every corner, and war-nurses and God knows what else, check out that disembodied head above the main entrance.

It operates as a hotel and is often hired out as a filming location. I like to think of it underlit as the sinister setting for the climax of a Louise Brooks film about Elks. It has a religious seriousness. It contains Anthony Heinsbergen murals painted on leather. Movies shot here include Nixon, Fisher King, Wild at Heart, Bugsy, the Mask, the Bodyguard, Chaplin, and Barton Fink among others.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Atlantic Richfield Oil Building, Downtown Los Angeles

1929

 

 

 

 

Architects Morgan, Wells and Clements. According to the HABS data pages, Richfield Oil went into recivership at virtually the same time the building opened. And according to the highly recommended USC Los Angeles Walking Tour site, these four figures represent Aviation, Postal Service, Industry, and Commerce.

...You know, I think I suddenly understand something. Many times I've thought, of course it was steel construction that killed these figural sculptures, it just doesn't provide the same opportunities. Hard to carve into a building that's not stone. And what if some smart sculptor tried to extend that sculpting tradition into this other medium, so you'd have steel sculptures on a steel building? What would that look like? ...This?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fine Arts Building, Downtown Los Angeles

1927

 

 

Since 1927 the Fine Arts Building has changed hands and been renamed as the Signal Oil Building, the Havenstrite Building, and the Global Marine House, before being restored and renamed the Fine Arts Building in 1982. Walker & Eisen Architects.

"Rich surfaces and tile ornament" reportedly in the 2-story lobby if you happen to be in the neighborhood.

The figure of "Architecture" has a companion on the other side, "Sculpture", both done by sculptor Burt Johnson. According to this site about public art in L.A., I got so distracted by this homoerotic dreamboat 'Architecture' guy forever nervously gripping his ledge that I completely missed two other sculptural groups on the top floor of the building, I believe the 11th floor, who are standing up straight like good citizens, and two other single female figures on the 9th floor who are -- what? Languidly luxuriating? Crumpled like addicts? Sunbathing? That's the most peculiar relationship of figure-to-building I've ever seen.

In the lobby there's a wealth of legendary Batchelder tile and another Burt Johnson bronze, a nude boy playing a flute "flanked by two identical kneeling girls modeled on Johnson's daughter, Cynthia Mae, holding a wriggling fish between her fingers". Johnson had a heart attack while working on the building, directed further progress from his wheelchair, and died three months later at the age of 37.

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

Copyright 2005 - 2007 Walt Lockley. All rights reserved.