USC Von KleinSmid Center, Los Angeles, Calif., 1968
Los Angeles, CA
1968
Edward Durell Stone
In the 1960s and 1970s the University of Southern California commissioned a number of important modern architects to contribute buildings to its growing campus. Thom photographed many of these, including structures by William Pereira, Killingsworth, Brady Smith, and A. Quincy Jones, whose noteworthy 1976 Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism building Thom much admired. Another significant commission was for the USC Von KleinSmid Center, won by Edward Durell Stone. Durell Stone was at the height of his career when he proposed this New Formalist building, reminiscent of Northern Italian Renaissance forms common to the campus.
Thom photographed the Von KleinSmid Center shortly after graduating from the Brooks Institute, but there is nothing amateur about his capability this early in his career. He photographs the globe-topped tower from a dramatic worm’s-eye perspective, organized at a slight diagonal in the picture plane and framed by an adjacent structure. The tower is shrouded in deep shadow at its lower reaches before shooting out into brilliant sky above. In another photograph, a deep overhang is used as a framing device for the complex’s central skyscraper, which can be seen from around the campus. Thom photographs the structures in a way that accentuates both their scale and their simplicity, allowing the building’s shadows and Classical lines and brick archways to speak for themselves.
References:
Mary Anne Hunting, Edward Durell Stone, Modernism’s Populist Architect, W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.
Los Angeles Conservancy, University of Southern California Modern Buildings, web.
USC Libraries, Von Kleinsmid Center Library History, web.