ARCHITECTURE : Pair of ‘50s Office Buildings Provide Noble Gateway to Beverly Hills
Somebody at Buckeye Construction knew what they were doing. Back in 1955, they developed and built a small office building on the northeast corner of La Cienega Boulevard and Gregory Way in Beverly Hills. It was a fairly standard little three-story stucco affair enlivened with some stone and terrazzo around the entrance. Architect Samuel Riesbord gave the developer clean lines and a snazzy curved soffit over the corner entrance.
Then, a year later, Buckeye built another small building across La Cienega. Though it has almost the same amount of square footage, it is one story taller and a lot narrower. A different architect, Alec Arany, is credited with the design. The nice thing is that the second building matches the first one. It has the same basic organization, the same colors and the same curved canopy. The result is a pair of closely matched structures that create a modest and subtle gateway to the dense corridor of Wilshire Boulevard just to the north.
The designs of the two buildings, officially designated as 291 and 292 South La Cienega Boulevard, are so similar that to the motorist rushing up the broad boulevard they may seem identical. But if you look closely, you can start to see the differences that make the east (292) and earlier building a little better.
First, it is longer, and the strongly horizontal lines of the office floors follow the splayed angle between La Cienega and the side street, so that the building seems larger than it is.
The main point of the building is its office space. The office floors are expressed in bands of whitish stucco into which is cut a continuous band of windows, shaded by angular fins. This horizontal mass floats on a row of columns and a few fragmentary stone-clad walls grouped around pedestrian and automobile entrances, so that the clarity of the main function of the building is contrasted with the complexity of the movement along the street. The whole thing is clamped together with a gray-painted, mosaic tile-paneled stair tower that rises from the south of the lobby, past the office floors and up to a stack of mechanical boxes on the roof. It is a simple, but highly animated, composition.
The 291 building is chunkier and more simplified. The stair tower has become a vestigial gray plane, and it has no automobile entrance on La Cienega, so that the short facade is blander than its older sibling across the street.
It does, however, have more presence from the north, where its taller height allows it to stand out over its one- and two-story neighbors. What is more important, it works as part of this two-part composition, providing a vertical counterpart to the horizontal lines of the whole, while playing its differences off in the same materials.
Those materials are all self-consciously synthetic, speaking with all the pride in science that only the 1950s could muster. The forms are also abstract fragments of some table of functional elements--a stair tower here, an office floor there, an entrance flourish from the third column over--each expressed with a simple geometric shape.
That is what makes this modest pair of structures work so well: Each of them is made out of a kit of parts that one can easily see extending down the street, recombined into different compositions according to the site or the scale of the building.
It makes you realize that there is in fact a vernacular language of small office buildings in Los Angeles. Drive down any of our major boulevards, and you will see lots more of these optimistic little collages of angular geometries that have survived being replaced by bigger, blander buildings.
They are not great architecture, but they are the stuff of which at least part of our city is made. When you see how they can come together to help define a major gateway into a city like Beverly Hills, you realize that we could have done a lot worse.
