In the go-go years of the 1920s and early 1930s Art Moderne (or as it is also known, Art Deco) became the architecture of choice in downtown Los Angeles–at least for men commissioning office buildings that would reflect their success, their embrace of the new. Today these buildings are still really spectacular and many have been converted into very expensive lofts and apartments, including one that belonged to Johnny Depp. He sold it during his divorce.
The interior of the One Bunker Hill building on Fifth Street seems almost like a fabulous set for a Hollywood movie–except that all the marble on the walls and floors is true Italian marble.
Happily, the Los Angeles Conservancy offers an Art Deco tour of 12 of the buildings. Sadly, trying to visit 12 buildings spread over a mile of city streets in 2 hours meant we ended up seeing mostly exteriors, so I went back downtown a few days later and took photos of the interior of one building, the One Bunker Hill building–formerly the Southern California Edison building–at 601 W. 5th St. The first floor is now occupied by a bank so anyone can come into the building and look around.
Students of architecture will immediately realize that the opulent interior of the One Bunker Hill building is more “Wow-Look-At-Me”, than the streamlined exterior would suggest. So here are a few photographs of that building, starting with the exterior. (In a future post I will show photos of some of the other buildings, including the amazing Los Angeles Central Library.)
An amazing fact: almost all these Art Moderne buildings are clad in terracotta tile made to look like limestone. The tile company still exists in Northern California. The soaring skyscrapers behind the building were erected in the 1980s when the old Victorian homes on Bunker Hills were destroyed to make way for these high rises.The lobby walls are covered with striated Italian marble. More marble of many different patterns are found on the floors.The ornate coffered ceiling in the lobby of One Bunker Hill.The hand reaching from the sky in the upper right of this mural in the lobby is supposed to be the electricity supplied by So, Cal. Edison. Figures in the mural represent ths history of electricity, including Ben Franklin on the far right.Tucked away in a back corridor is a fountain that, while not signed, is clearly the work of famed Southern California ceramicist Ernest Batchelder, who taught at Cal Tech in Pasadena. This work is more Art Nouveau than Art Deco.The docent for the L.A. Conservancy at the entrance to One Bunker Hill. The sculpture doesn’t look very Art Deco. It looks more like ’80s art to me.
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