Hollywood Midcentury Modern Design

The Hollywood Center Motel features a jagged, neon-lit sign that stretches vertically against the skyline, a hallmark of mid-century motor lodge architecture. Built in the late nineteen fifties, the motel served travelers arriving in Los…

The building at sixty-four thirty Sunset Boulevard is marked by a deep, mid-century concrete screen that shields its glass facade from the street. This is the former headquarters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Before…

The Cinerama Dome is a massive concrete geodesic sphere, composed of three hundred sixteen individual hexagonal and pentagonal panels. It opened in nineteen sixty-three as the first theater specifically built for Cinerama, a wide-angle…

The Hollywood Palladium features a massive, streamlined art deco facade with a wide, rounded marquee that wraps around the corner of Sunset Boulevard. Tommy Dorsey opened this ballroom in nineteen forty, using the money he saved by buying…

The building on Sunset Boulevard with the clean, white horizontal lines and the sweeping rounded corner was the first facility in the world built specifically for television and radio broadcasting. When it opened in nineteen thirty-eight,…

The Sunset Vine Tower wears a distinct white facade of vertical concrete fins, rising twenty stories above the corner of Sunset and Vine. Completed in nineteen sixty-three, it held the title of the tallest building in Hollywood for…

The Chase Bank on Hollywood Boulevard occupies the former site of the Hillview Apartments. Built in nineteen seventeen, the original complex provided a home for silent film stars like Clara Bow and Rudolph Valentino. The apartments were…

The thirteen story tower at seventeen fifty North Vine Street is shaped like a stack of phonograph records. Capitol Records built this headquarters in nineteen fifty-six to accommodate the burgeoning high-fidelity recording industry.…