ARCHITECTURE : Today’s Damaged Monument to Lost Hope Once Stood for Progress

When Los Angeles was still a young city becoming a major metropolis, architects were fond of designing their stores, office buildings and monuments in a style we now call “Streamline Moderne.”

These curved, horizontal and sometimes bulbous buildings spoke of the energy of a new city driven by cars, technology and the promise of a better future. After 50 years of cynicism and spasms of outright despair such as we have experienced during the L.A. riots, they are damaged monuments to lost hope.

Amid the rubble of lost dreams, one reminder of what could have been remains: the old Sears, Roebuck store, wedged into an irregular plot of land where Venice, San Vicente and Pico boulevards converge. The Midtown Shopping Center next door was looted and partially burned during the riots, but what is now Builders Discount remains intact. Green awnings, green paint and boarded windows have transfigured this once ground-breaking design into just another block of underutilized real estate in an economically depressed area.

When it was designed in 1938 by John S. Redden and John G. Raben, the Sears, Roebuck store was cited by critics and planners everywhere as a model for the future: an efficient concrete structure that used the logic of its construction and site to give an image to a culture of convenience.

Separate pavilions catered to motorists by providing drive-through pickups. The slope of the hill into which the store was built gave the architects three levels on which to park cars, including the roof of the store, where a delicate pavilion welcomed visitors into this new world lifted above the city.

The concrete was rounded at the corners and accentuated with curved awnings, strip windows and strong horizontal lines to give the impression that the building was deformed by the energy of the cars zooming by on the busy boulevards.

This energetic blurring of lines continued in the rounded corners of columns, escalators and display counters inside. This was an era when streamlining as a style was supposed to represent both the new efficiency of the post-Depression consumer society (the removal of barriers to buying) and our ability to speed up, clean up and energize the forms of our city.

After being published in architecture magazines and represented at the Museum of Modern Art, this Sears settled into being just another store. Over the years the neighborhood changed and the enclosed mall, that symbol of isolated, almost paranoid attitudes toward retail, replaced the symbolic beacon of the stand-alone store.

A few years ago, Sears moved out and the bottom floors became a cavernous, stripped-down warehouse for building supplies, while the top floors became crammed with the little stalls of an institutionalized swap meet. Fixtures were removed, a completely inappropriate color scheme was added, and the store ceased to function as anything but a place to save money.

There are some grand plans for this area. The Red Line is supposed to have a station here, and city officials and developers alike have been eyeing this irregular slice of land as the site for anything from an outlet mall to one of those mixed complexes, including housing, shopping and offices, that seems to be the current answer to many urban ills.

The Sears store would probably not survive such a new vision, but then there is little but its barest outlines left anyway. Now it sits even more forlornly, a symbol of progress gutted by the reality of an economic system that was supposed to be eased from our consciousness by the streamlines of the architecture.