Back to the Future : Architecture: L.A. Conservancy tour will visit Modern buildings constructed between 1945 and 1964, a unique, optimistic period, guide Pete Moruzzi says.

Touring Los Angeles with Pete Moruzzi is like traveling with a fervid believer on a pilgrimage through a holy land. In his case, the religion is Southern California architecture in the 20 years after World War II, and the shrines include the Capitol Tower, the Cinerama Dome, the Palmdale House apartments and Ship’s coffee shop.

“The thing I love most about them is they reflect an extremely playful, experimental time in American history. It was a unique, brief, optimistic period in American history, especially in Los Angeles,” said Moruzzi, a 32-year-old computer marketer who has become a missionary for Modern architecture in a Postmodern world.

Moruzzi’s calling is to proselytize why the geometric Mar Vista housing tract designed by Gregory Ain deserves as much attention as Victorian bungalows, why the Space Age excesses of Pann’s coffee shop in Ladera Heights demands the same respect as Art Deco department stores. He delights in showing off a concrete doorway screen shaped like a snowflake at the original Directors’ Guild building in Hollywood, built in 1954, or the large rubber tree in the glass lobby of the Fairfax district’s Devonshire Motel, built in 1955.

“L.A. is the mecca of Modernism. This is where the gods of Modernism were doing their work. So where else could I live?” asked Moruzzi, who is the volunteer chairman of the Los Angeles Conservancy’s Modern Committee.

On April 17, he and fellow devotees will get an unprecedented chance to preach to a large audience of the converted and the uninitiated. The conservancy, a nonprofit preservation organization, is sponsoring a driving and walking tour of 79 noteworthy houses, shops, hotels, theaters, restaurants, schools, office buildings and a gasoline station built between 1945 and 1964.

Moruzzi and the other unpaid docents hope the sprawling tour will help save structures even if some styles give today’s aesthetes the creeps, the blahs or the giggles.

As a reminder of losses, the tour passes several sites of demolished Modern landmarks, such as the departed Googie’s coffee shop, designed by John Lautner and built at Crescent Heights and Sunset boulevards in 1949; Googie’s, with its flying red roof, lent its name to an exuberant architectural trend aimed at attracting passing motorists. An early McDonald’s hamburger stand in Downey is too far off the main path for the tour, but its threatened demolition adds relevancy.

“Even if people currently don’t like these buildings that much, our goal is to just get them to actually look and understand how significant they were and why they were built the way they were,” Moruzzi said during a dry run of the tour. Tastes, he confidently predicts, will come around. After all, now-beloved gingerbread Victorian houses were for many years considered “ugly and overdone and ridiculous.”

Moruzzi is an unusual candidate for his avocation. He is not an architect, not a critic, not an artist, but a self-taught enthusiast. Raised in Hawaii, he earned an economics degree at UC Berkeley and moved to Los Angeles five years ago in part, he says, because of its architecture.

His home is in Silver Lake, near houses designed by his heroes Ain, Lautner, Richard Neutra and R. M. Schindler; within an easy walk is the Astro, a 1958 diner by the Googie firm of Armet and Davis. The apartment, built in the 1940s, is furnished with blond wood pieces of the era and two vintage TVs.

A 1961 Buick LeSabre convertible used to grace the driveway until, he confesses, maintenance got too expensive. So, at the wheel of his 1993 Honda, Moruzzi set out on the dry run, telling how the Modern principle of “less is more” blossomed in the California sun.

Originally a prewar European revolt against ornamentation, Modernism was characterized by glass-enclosed houses with flat roofs and efficient, sleek office buildings with horizontal window bands. In the 1950s, a fascination with the future found expression in new construction techniques and marketing gimmicks. Using plastics and metal alloys, Space Age diners looked ready for takeoff and motels seemed ready for the Jetsons. Unlike Postmodernism, which echoes classical styles, Modernism allowed no looking back.

The conservancy tour begins at the Hollywood’s Capitol Tower, the world’s first round office building. It is, he said, “fabulous,” although it really was not designed to look like a stack of records with a needle on top. (The architect who designed it in 1954, Welton Becket, contended that the round layout would promote efficiency.) Moruzzi cruised through Hollywood, Mid-Wilshire, Beverly Hills, Culver City, Mar Vista and Inglewood, with a break at the restored Ship’s on Washington Boulevard for a dose of its neon jet trail sign and table-side toasters.

Along the way, he pointed to less flashy buildings, like the two-story, red and green Palmdale House apartments in West Hollywood. Designed in 1951 by Sanford Kent, the building fronts the side street with a trellis swooping off its roof. “You can take something that’s functional and make something sculptural,” Moruzzi says.

“Mishmash” is Moruzzi’s ultimate put down and he uses it for the nearby Virgin Megastore on Sunset Strip. That new retail and movie complex qualifies as his creed’s Great Satan because it is high Postmodern, combining ancient Roman patterns with colorful fun house doodads.

“I think it’s sort of a betrayal of the tenets of Modernism, which was, ‘Form follows function,’ ” he said. “This is pretty much decoration. There’s no integrity to it really and, I think, within just a few years, it will be dated. I don’t think it will age well.”

In Mar Vista, he argues for the Ain tract of boxy houses that might send Spanish revival fans fleeing. “It’s a time warp, it’s incredible,” Moruzzi said cruising Beethoven, Moore and Meier streets. “It’s everything you love about Modern--the flat roofs, beautiful landscaping, clean lines, lots of glass. It’s tasteful, it’s elegant, it’s consistent. It’s not a mishmash.”