Federal Aviation Administration Agency, Hawthorne, Calif, 1973
Hawthorne, CA
1973
DMJM (Cesar Pelli and Anthony Lumsden)
The Federal Aviation Administration Agency building is arguably the structure most symbolic of the region’s confluence of a strong aeronautics industry with experiments in Late Modern mirror glass skin architecture. Designed by Cesar Pelli and Anthony Lumsden for the firm Daniel Mann Johnson & Mendenhall (DMJM), its sleek gridded surfaces and curved edges evoke the aerodynamic design of experimental aircrafts.
Cesar Pelli, who had been hired as the firm’s Director of Design in 1964, recruited Lumsden, his former colleague in Michigan’s Roche/Dinkeloo office shortly after acquiring his new job. The two forged an inventive partnership, encouraged by a region untethered by entrenced architectural traditions to create a new design vocabulary on par with the innovative activities the buildings would house. As explained by architectural historian Daniel Paul, “beginning in 1966 Pelli and Lumsden would create and refine the glass skin, an easily shaped, reversed mullion, continuous grid design system that would become a corporate vernacular in the western world throughout the 1970’s…” The Federal Aviation Administration building was the first building to be designed with a mirrored glass façade in Southern California, although it was not the first built, an honor credited to the CNA Building by Langdon and Wilson, also photographed by Wayne Thom.
For the FAA Building, Thom emphasizes vast expanses of smooth gridded glass, blue sky reflected on surfaces, and a mirrored façade that repels visibility into the building’s interior activities. Photographed in both black and white and color, Thom provides a varied interpretation of the architect’s innovative use of materials and how they interact with exterior environmental conditions. One photograph frames a single corner where the horizontal aluminum mullions, engineered to protrude only 3/8 of an inch, turn a rounded corner. The recessed first floor gives the building a lightweight feel and Thom photographs it just as a burst of light reflects off the surface. The image, like the building, evokes flight.
References:
Daniel Paul, “Westward Traditions,” L.A. Forum, Issue 7, 2015.
Anthony Lumsden, DMJM, A+U, No 51, March, 1975.
“DMJM”, Los Angeles Conservancy, web.
“Federal Aviation Administration West Coast Headquarters,” Los Angeles Conservancy, web.
Riddle Danette, Architecture at work: DMJM design Los Angeles, New York, N.Y.: Edizioni Press, 2004.
DMJM, Architecture, v. 89, n. 1, 2000, 31.