It’s Form Over Function at Helms Bakery Building

Anyone who grew up in Los Angeles in the 1940s or ‘50s knows about the Helms Bakery. They couldn’t help it. Three hundred or more trucks crisscrossed Los Angeles daily, delivering “Olympic Bread” right to doorsteps. And, according to historian Karen Bundy, 90% of all grade school children in Los Angeles took a tour of the bakery.

Finally, there was the Helms Bakery Building itself, a building on Venice Boulevard that you could smell before you saw. The image was so strong that even now that the factory is home to furniture showrooms, artists’ studios and a fencing school, the sign with its name is still there. The Helms Building has become a Pop Art icon that sells nothing but itself.

Paul Helms started the bakery in 1930 with large ambitions. He had E.L. Bruner design a facade that had more in common with City Hall than with a factory. Its smooth, but repetitive skin has a castellated look, giving the impression that something important is going on inside. In 1932, Helms got the job to supply the Olympic training tables--a contract he held through 1958--and added the athletic appellation to his bread. He also added the Olympic imagery, making the Streamline Moderne building seem both sportier and more classical.

The architecture of the building sums up Helms’ and his architect’s ability to come up with a powerful and simple image that had nothing to do with the product. The building is a functional factory with a pretty face pasted on to it. That facade is only two stories, but seems much larger, mainly because of the tower-like elements that stick up only a few feet higher but have pretensions that reach up to the sky.

Though the stone veneer skin is simple, elaborate friezes, cartouches and a strong rhythm of piers give it a monumental sheen. The decorative flourishing consists mainly of flower motif, with a few Latin words and some Olympic imagery thrown in. A sheath of wheat in some of the cartouches is all that alludes to the work at hand. Neither the sparse sprinkling of odd imagery nor the asymmetry of this stretched-out, added-onto front can detract from the sense that there is an order and a message here, even if you can’t quite figure out what it’s saying.

Behind the facade, the real work went on in what were then very modern surroundings, filled (at least in the area the public was allowed to see) with the latest and most lovingly polished machines. When Helms closed the business in 1969, new owners marketed the space for discount antique and furniture salesrooms. The bakery spaces were divided, covered over and denuded of their equipment. The facade, however, remains because it makes whatever goes on inside recognizable. These days, furniture sales are on the decline and artists, production companies and other service industries are on the rise, so the Helms sign has become a directional signal for people looking for a studio rather than a chair.

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It doesn’t really matter what goes on inside the Helms building. Because the space is flexible, the facade stands out and the name is recognizable, this building will probably always have a use. For those who still want to find bread there, you’ll even find a small discount bakery at Helms Street and Washington Boulevard. For the rest of us, “Helms,” “Olympic” and a generically grand architecture just have become beacons in a landscape where flexibility of both association and function take precedence over any stable sense of place.

Betsky teaches and writes about architecture.

Helms Bakery Building: Venice Boulevard and Helms Street, Culver City

Architect: E.L. Bruner