Three of the most notable people involved with the project include Gordon Bunshaft, the design Principal at SOM, and Natalie de Blois who assisted him as the Project Designer, and Charles Luckman. Trained as an architect, his first job was drafting for Pepsodent Toothpaste's marketing department. He turned out to be so gifted as sales, that in short order he became the President of Pepsodent landing on the cover of Time Magazine as the 'Boy Wonder of American Business' at the ripe old age of 30. He became the US President of Unilever, decided to move the company from Boston to New York, and secured the block on Park Avenue. The UN had just been completed and he wanted to commission the modern office of the future. He commissioned Skidmore Owings and Merrill; and met with the partners in a hotel room so no one at Unilever would catch whiff of his plans.The design breakthrough was a reading of the zoning code that allowed the building to be a rectangular tower it occupied less than 25% of its site instead of a ziggurat. This was a the first time anyone had done this. Additional amenities included a ground floor Art Gallery, a computer room on the second floor, and the plaza. Due to cost overruns, Luckman was actually fired prior to move in. He called his former Architecture School roommate, William Pereira who invited Luckman to join his small office in Los Angeles. They build a practice in LA before splitting. The renovation begun in 1998 added the Isamu Noguchi sculpture garden which had been planned but never installed.

Lever House

 Barry Bergdoll, Phillip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA speaks on how the interaction between the Seagram Building, Lever House, and Tennis and Racquet Club activates the urban environment at 53rd Street and Park Avenue. 

Lever House considered the 1st modernist skyscraper in New York was commissioned by Charles Luckman who was President (and trained as an architect). &nbsp;Rather than make a wedding cake tower as the 1916 New York Zoning Code required for tall buildings, Gordon Bunshaft's act of genius was to set the the building back and only utilize a quarter of the available site area. &nbsp;Other Innovative features included the curtain wall, lack of retail on the ground floor, plaza art program and other employee amenities. &nbsp;It has been renovated several times (all by SOM).

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
Two pictures depict Boston as it morphed from a tired city with a failing economy to the boomtown of today.

We're looking at the Prudential Tower in the Back Bay. In the older view, it stands alone, under construction, surrounded by a sea of dereliction. In the current view, it looks more like a tall grandfather in a happy family portrait, surrounded by its architectural progeny.

Before the arrival of the Pru, the site was used only for the train yards of the Boston & Albany railroad. "These yards," wrote Walter Muir Whitehill in his snobbish but informative Boston: A Topographical History, "had for decades protected the Back Bay from the grubby infringements of Huntington Avenue and the even less desirable influence of the South End."

The Prudential Insurance Co. acquired the railroad land but then refused to build, claiming the real estate tax was too high. The state broke the deadlock by passing the legendary Chapter 121A, a law that provided the Pru (and many later developments) with a tax break.

The original Pru complex included, besides the office tower, a shopping mall, apartment houses, hotels, a parking garage, and a convention center. It as an island, though, painfully isolated from the rest of the city. Most of it was erected on a platform 18 feet above street level, high enough to clear the headroom of the Mass. Pike and railway tunnels that pierce the site. Also not helpful were the numerous windy and vacant plazas.

In recent years, the Pru's owners -- at first the insurance company, more recently Boston Properties -- have filled those dead plazas with a lively network of indoor shopping arcades. The Pru feels more like part of the city now, but nobody has ever called it beautiful. The tower's aluminum-curtain wall, although it's been modified, still looks like mesh you'd pull down over the front of your pawnshop to defy burglars. The architect was Charles Luckman, once the CEO of Lever Brothers, who turned to architecture in midlife.

The new photo shows the Pru tower in the background. In the foreground is new development that the Pru helped spawn. It's a vital scene, but a dismal one. A glass gerbil tube, which allows shoppers to glide through the city without actually touching it, spans a never-ending river of traffic exiting the turnpike. The tube connects the Copley Place shopping center, at left, with the Westin hotel. Both buildings look inward to their atriums and lobbies rather than outward to their neighbors. This is a world for cars, consumers, and conventioneers, not yet a place anyone can take pleasure in.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Self-Centered", Boston Globe, 13 March 2005

Prudential Tower

Robert Brown talks about the history of Prudential Center and its transformation from a Modern distinct object in the urban fabric to a well-connected and expanded contemporary hubspot. 

Fred Brink shares his experience working on the 'Where's Boston?' exhibition during the bicentennial years in Boston.

 The Forum is the largest and most iconic building in Inglewood. Because of the Forum and the Lakers, Sparks and Kings sports teams who made it their home, Inglewood became known as the 'City of Champions'. The story of the Forum begins with Jack Kent Cooke, the larger than life personality who was a part owner of the Lakers. He wanted to bring the NHL to Los Angeles, planning to install them in the LA Memorial Sports Arena. After he was rebuffed by a competing bid by the Rams, he decided to construct a new, more spectacular arena in Inglewood and promised to have a team ready to play in the Arena by December 31, 1967, less than a year later. This gesture netted him the National Hockey League franchise and the City of Inglewood got the Forum, although at that point he had neither site nor financing. As his architect, he chose Charles Luckman reaching out to him as a man "with a reputation who could solve an impossible problem". There was no time to be lost. Luckman was allocated a month for the design; the building had to be fast tracked which meant that construction would start while design was underway. In his autobiography, Luckman said that he was inspired by the Roman Coloseum thinking that Cook would be a Classicist. A month later, Cooke was shown a rendering of the column free circular building seating 17,000 resting on a podium with a sign calling it the Forum. Cooke declared it fabulous. The name stuck. Cooke was sent off to fulfill his part of the bargain which was that he would leave the design team alone. Needless to say, construction took on a frenzied pace with workers building round the clock. An on-site factory was constructed to create the 60' Romanesque arches which were too big to be transported on the street. Helicopters were even used to deploy the rooftop mechanical units. When the building finally opened on schedule Cooke gave a spectacular New Year's Eve party featuring a ribbon cutting ceremony with an 85 ft long ribbon and a lengthy cast of dignitaries to cut it. One of the first stadiums to have naming rights, the Forum was formally known as the Great Western Forum from 1988 - 2003 due to the sponsorship of Great Western Savings and Loan. Pretty much every performer of note has played there. The lengthy list includes: Steppenwolf, Cream, the Jackson 5, Barbra Streisand, the Eagles, KISS, Fleetwood Mac, and Diana Ross, among others. Major sports events were held. Highlights include the basketball tournament and the finals of Men's team handball for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. By 2000, the Forum was sold and transformed into the Faithful Central Bible Church. In 2012 it was sold to Madison Square Garden in 2012 who embarked on a renovation. The Forum reopened in January, 2014 with an extravaganza featuring six concerts by the Eagles. 

The Forum

Anne Cheek LaRose discusses the original and remodel of the Forum in Inglewood, CA.

Anne Cheek La Rose discusses the history and current status of oil in Inglewood, CA.

Michael Massenberg discusses two projects that he worked on at the newly opened Forum in Inglewood, CA.

 Adjacent to City Hall is the Library. One of the most unique features of the building is its organization and circulation flow. The front facade would naturally be on Manchester Boulevard, the main street. Luckman fliped it to the Plaza side and then placed the cars and service below the building. This forces everyone to go through the Plaza and proceed upwards to the second level. There are other features emblematic of International Style Buildings of the era. Each elevation is different reflecting the building's orientation. Circulation elements (stair and ramp) are visually expressed and are bumped out of the facade plane. The functional elements such as the Lecture Hall are treated as separate buildings. The building is also made of poured-in-place reinforced concrete, a technique that requires precise wooden molds to be made. It was the material of choice for many significant public buildings of the era, most notably Boston City Hall. It was very innovative at the time allowing the architect to create very sculptural facades with a tremendous amount of precision. It is not used as widely today, probably because of the expense and level of craftsmanship required. Using it for the Library allowed Tom Van Sant to create The Written Word very successfully incorporating an artwork into the elevations. 

Inglewood Public Library

The Convention Center, designed by architect Charles Luckman, opened in 1971 and expanded in 1993 and 1997. It was originally built as a rectangle building, between Pico Boulevard and 11th Street (now Chick Hearn Ct.) on Figueroa Street. The northeast portion of the Center was demolished in 1997 to make way for the Staples Center. The Convention Center Annex of green glass and white steel frames, mainly on the south side of Pico, was designed by architect James Ingo Freed.

The LACC is one of the largest convention centers in the United States with over 720,000 sq ft (67,000 m2) of exhibition space, 147,000 sq ft (13,700 m2) of meeting space, and a 299 seat theater.

Los Angeles Convention Center

Aon Center is a 62-story,  Modernist office skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles, California. The rectangular black building with white trim is remarkably slender for a skyscraper in a seismically active area. It is the second-tallest building in Los Angeles, the second-tallest in California, and the 31st-tallest in the United States. 

United California First Interstate Bank (AON Building)

 Inglewood's twenty-nine-acre Civic Center contains its City Hall, main library, a fire station, a police facility, a parking garage, and a public health complex in a square bounded by La Brea Avenue, Florence Avenue, Manchester Boulevard, and Fir Avenue. Completed in 1973, the Civic Center was designed by Charles Luckman Associates to revitalize Inglewood's civic and business district. Its plan aimed to increase mobility in the area for both pedestrians and cars, and create landscaped open space in the heart of the city. The complex's most impressive buildings are its eight-story City Hall, standing atop a wide, two-story base, and its four-level library building, which is supported on tall columns. Both are Brutalist in style, with their monumental concrete bulks serving as both structure and ornamentation. The library includes an interesting mural-in-concrete called The Written Word, created by sculptor Tom Van Sant and looking like modern rock art images rising up a tall column. All of the buildings are tied together by a landscape designed by landscape architect Robert Herrick Carter. It features expansive green spaces and multiple pedestrian malls and bridges, including elevated walkways that help facilitate foot traffic. Inglewood's Civic Center is a successful rethinking of the city's governmental core, combining a verdant landscape with monumental concrete buildings to create a flowing and vibrant urban center. 

Inglewood Civic Center

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
Buildings don't get much dumber looking than the Lord & Taylor store that is part of the Prudential Center, on Boylston Street, in the Back Bay. The closest it comes to architecture is the glitzy logo. The rest is a blank billboard. But 50 years ago, this site looked even worse. The 28 acres of prime real estate that is now the prudential center was a railroad yard. In the olf photo, we see grass growing through the Boston & Albany tracks. 

The yard didn't disappear until the early 1960s, when Boston, eager for investment after a long depression, gave the Prudential Insurance Co. a tax break to build its Northeast headquarters on the old yard. At the same time, the Massachusetts Turnpike was extended from Route 128 to downtown Boston, cutting through the yard. The Pike, as well as passenger rail lines, still run beneath the Prudential Center - one reason why much of the Pru is raised, with seeming arrogance, on a platform above the city. 

Lord & Taylor and the rest of the original Prudential Center were designed by an architect named Charled Luckman. Luckman could not find work as a young architect during the Great Depression, so he went into the soap business. He rose to become president of Lever Brothers, in which capacity he became the client for a classic early-modern office tower, Lever House, in New York (designed by Gordon Bunshaft). Lever House got Luckman interested in architecture again, and he left Lever Brothers to form his own architectural firm. 

Alas, Luckman sold soap better than he designed buildings. The original Pru complex was an ugly alien. Instead of joinging the city life along Boylston Street, it was set back, for most part, behind wind-swept plazas. In recent years, some of those plazas have been filled in with shops and arcades. And in another year or two, a new owner, Boston Properties, expects to replace the asphalt access road (in the foreground of the new photograph) with apartments over retail shops, about 13 stories in all - roughly the height of the Lenox, which we see in the background, a modest railroad hotel of 1901 by a prominent local architect, Arthur Bowditch. 

Good cities aren't made of vacant lots. Perhaps as it continues to fill in, the Pru will begin to feel like a part of Boston rather than a vast tourist capsule from Mars. 

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Prudential Center", Boston Globe, 1998

Lord & Taylor at Prudential Center

 Anchoring Inglewood's Civic Center Complex is its eight-story City Hall. The building's design is very much in keeping with Luckman's work beginning with Lever House which established the modern office 'Tower in a Park'. Consequently, the building is set back from Manchester Boulevard. The only signpost marking the entry is Tony DeLap's Skedans sculpture. Cars were housed discretely in the adjacent parking structure half buried in the landscape, and the building was accessed from a garden either at grade or via an upper level ramp. It has many of the hallmarks of the International Style. Even though the building is organized with a ring of offices around each floor plate, each facade is treated differently to respond to its orientation. The building incorporates a bevy of technical features then considered state-of-the-art: it is constructed of poured-in-place concrete, the windows are set back with concrete 'bris soleil' or sunscreens, tinted glass, and (typical of the time) it was fully air conditioned throughout. All of the buildings are tied together by a landscape designed by landscape architect Robert Herrick Carter. It features expansive green spaces and multiple pedestrian malls and bridges, including elevated walkways that help facilitate foot traffic. Inglewood's Civic Center is a successful rethinking of the city's governmental core, combining a verdant landscape with monumental concrete buildings to create a flowing and vibrant urban center. 

Inglewood City Hall

The Written Word is Tom Van Sant’s public art treatment for three distinct concrete areas of the Inglewood Public Library. The work is cast into the concrete surfaces of the exterior stairwell column on Manchester; the lower level of an interior lobby, and an exterior wall of the Lecture Hall.

Van Sant explores the development of written thought in numbers, letters, theories and histories from diverse cultures in diverse times. Egyptian hieroglyphics, Polynesian counting systems, European cave painting and Einstein’s mathematical equations are some of the many images to inspire Library's patrons with the wealth of words found inside.

Van Sant was commissioned through the NEA Art in Architecture program to work with Civic Center architects Charles Luckman and Associates, This artwork required special molds built in reverse so the texts and drawings would be correctly read, a technique requiring a high degree of craft. The Written Word is one of the few examples of a poured-in-place concrete bas-relief in the Los Angeles basin and one of the largest to employ this technique in the world.


The Written Word

Tony Delap talk about his fountain sculpture "Skedans".

What makes The Written Word unique is the collaboration between the artwork and the architecture both in the content for the hieroglyphics added to the facade and the technique of how they were integrated into the poured concrete.



In Incomplete Conch Shell sculptor Jack Zajac draws inspiration from the natural world. Blending traditions of surrealist and romanticist art, Incomplete Conch Shell bisects the marine shell’s central chamber with blunt geometry. The marble form is displayed on a circular pedestal on the west lawn of the Civic Center. Organic and abstract, the curvaceous work sits in strong contrast to the geometric architecture of City Hall.

Incomplete Conch Shell was purchased for the newly opened Inglewood Civic Center with funds made available through the Art-in-Architecture Program of the National Endowment for the Arts.


Incomplete Conch Shell

 Skedans is Tony DeLap`s site-specific commission for Inglewood`s Civic Center. Funded from the National Endowment for the Arts Art-in-Architecture Program it was an early precursor to contemporary public art efforts. Skedans refers to a Canadian Indian village in the Queen Charlotte Islands of the North Coast of British Columbia and was a tribal government site. DeLap frequented the area and was inspired by ancient trees and totems rising from the shallow waters. He brought the form and inspiration to Inglewood`s government center. DeLap worked with the Civic Center complex architects Charles Luckman and Associates to design a centerpiece monument for Inglewood City Hall. Skedans is a 50` tall upright column, standing on a 10` tall and 20` wide octagonal base that housed an early flow fountain. 

City Hall

Skedans

Skedans was created in conjunction with Charles Luckman's master plan for the Civic Center in Inglewood.  The artist talks about the collaboration now that it is a generation later and reflects on how the sculpture has impacted his body of work.

The 1st building, leased to P. T. Barnum, was demolished in 1890 because of a leaky roof and dangerous balconies that had collapsed, resulting in deaths.&nbsp;

The 2nd building was built by a syndicate that included J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, P. T. Barnum, Darius Mills, James Stillman and W. W. Astor. White gave them a Beaux-Arts structure with a Moorish feel, including a minaret-like tower modeled after Giralda, the bell tower of the Cathedral of Seville, soaring 32 stories, the city's second-tallest building at the time[citation needed] and dominating Madison Square Park. The main hall, which was the largest in the world, measured 200 feet by 350 feet with permanent seating for 8,000 people and floor space for thousands more. It had a 1,200-seat theater, a concert hall with a capacity of 1,500, the largest restaurant in the city, and a roof garden cabaret. The building cost $3 million. Madison Square Garden II was unsuccessful like the first Garden, and the New York Life Insurance Company, which held the mortgage on it, decided to tear it down in 1925 to make way for a new headquarters building, which would become the landmark Cass Gilbert-designed New York Life Building.

A 3rd Madison Square Garden opened in a new location. Built at the cost of $4.75 million in 249 days by boxing promoter Tex Rickard; the arena was dubbed "The House That Tex Built." The arena was 200 feet by 375 feet, with seating on three levels, and a maximum capacity of 18,496 spectators for boxing. Demolition commenced after the opening of the current Garden and is now the location of One Worldwide Plaza.

In February 1959, former automobile manufacturer Graham-Paige purchased a 40% interest in Madison Square Garden for $4 million and later gained control. In November 1960, Graham-Paige president Irving Mitchell Felt acquired the rights from the Pennsylvania Railroad to build at Penn Station. The original Pennsylvania Station's above-ground portions were demolished to make way for the new facility.The new Madison Square Garden was built above the platforms of an active railroad station, an engineering feat constructed by Robert E. McKee of El Paso, Texas. Public outcry over the demolition of the Beaux-Arts Penn Station led to the creation of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. The new Madison Square Garden opened on February 11, 1968. Yale architectural historian Vincent Scully famously remarked, "One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat," comparing the old and new Penn Station.

A multi-purpose indoor arena in New York City.

Also known as Great Roman Hippodrome; Gilmore's Garden

The first and second location

The third location

The fourth location

Madison Square Garden

The 1964/1965 New York World's Fair was a world's fair that held over 140 pavilions, 110 restaurants, for 80 nations (hosted by 37), 24 US states, and over 45 corporations to build exhibits or attractions at Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in Queens, New York City. The immense fair covered 646 acres (2.61 km2) on half the park, with numerous pools or fountains, and an amusement park with rides near the lake. However, the fair did not receive official support or approval from the Bureau of International Expositions (BIE).Hailing itself as a "universal and international" exposition, the fair's theme was "Peace Through Understanding", dedicated to "Man's Achievement on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe". American companies dominated the exposition as exhibitors. The theme was symbolized by a 12-story-high, stainless-steel model of the earth called the Unisphere, built on the foundation of the Perisphere from the 1939 World's Fair.The fair ran for two six-month seasons, April 22 – October 18, 1964, and April 21 – October 17, 1965. The admission price for adults was $2 in 1964.

1964 New York World's Fair

Luckman designed the United States Pavilion for the 1964 New York World's Fair, for which he received a jury award for the simple and bold structure that utilized dramatic engineering approach through the use of steel.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri. His father came from Germany and his mother from Yugoslavia.

He died at his home in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 89.

Charles Luckman was an American businessman, architect, and property developer known for designing iconic U.S. buildings like the Theme Building, Prudential Tower, Madison Square Garden, and The Forum. Nicknamed the "Boy Wonder of American Business" by Time in 1939 as president of Pepsodent, he later led Lever Brothers. In 1950, he co-founded the firm Pereira &amp; Luckman, which dissolved in 1958. He continued independently with Charles Luckman Associates. Luckman also served on Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights and led efforts like the Citizens Food Committee and Freedom Train, earning honors from several European nations. He was a strong advocate for public education.

Charles Luckman

In the late 1940s, President Truman appointed Charles Luckman to key public service roles. In 1946, he joined the President's Committee on Civil Rights, and in 1947, he became chairman of the Citizens Food Committee, tasked with aiding post-war Europe's recovery. He also directed the Freedom Train initiative. For his efforts, Luckman received honors from Britain, France, and Italy.

Charles Luckman

SITES

Related Sites

PLAYLISTS CURATED by Charles Luckman