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.
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.
