LAX Theme Building (1962, Pereira, Luckman, Becket, Williams)
Designated as a Los Angeles
Cultural Heritage Monument in 1994, it was remodelled by Disney Imagineering
into a popular
and successful lunch, dinner and cocktails destination called 'Encounters.'
Luckman and Pereira also
worked on the Convair Building.
"At Charles Luckman and William Pereira's ( now demolished ) Convair Astronautics Facility, a 579,000 square foot plant built to manufacture the country's first ICBM, a crisp Bauhaus lobby with windows and high ceilings had as its centrepiece a floating corkscrew of a staircase that itself was a wonder of physics.."
The parent company Skidmore Owings Merrill had risen to prominence through the military-industrial complex, designing among other things the Air Force Chapel and the 'atomic city' of Oak Ridge. They became better known for their pioneering glass curtain facades on structures such as the Lever Building. The visible and invisible went hand in hand.
Optimism and apocalypse in the Cold War Boom were intimately entwined. The engagement of architects and planners was now with the technological sublime as expressed in the accelerated needs of defence industries and their increasingly consumerist workforces.
This had comic overtones- see Ken Hollings "Tokyo must be destroyed" on the architecture of disaster movies- but the fatal flaw of this new architecture was its very inability to foresee the depth of the consumer boom and its ergonomic needs. Without a constant process of obsolescence and renewal to parallel the consumer imperative, the centre was doomed to stasis.