Inglewood’s nine-story City Hall was designed by Charles Luckman Associates architects as the Civic Center centerpiece. With hallmarks of Luckman’s International Style, City Hall is organized with a ring of offices around each floor. Each façade is treated differently, responding to north, south, east or west approaches.

The building’s technical features were then considered state-of-the-art. Poured-in-place concrete provides form and surface. Tall windows, deep-set in the façade, are filled with tinted glass. City Hall was fully air conditioned throughout, an innovation in 1973. City Hall is surrounded by 29 acres of Robert Herrick Carter’s thoughtful landscaping and numerous public artworks.

Charles Luckman, born in 1909 in Missouri, studied architecture at the University of Illinois. Graduating in the Depression he went into sales and rapidly rose to become president of Lever Brothers. After leading the company’s commission of Lever House, the first glass skyscraper on New York City’s Park Avenue, Luckman decided to return to architecture. He joined William Pereira’s firm, then established his own Los Angeles practice. Luckman designed Inglewood’s Forum, the Los Angeles Convention Center and New York’s Madison Square Garden. In 1946 President Harry Truman appointed Luckman to the President’s Committee on Civil Rights. Luckman died in 1999.

Robert Herrick Carter, born in Los Angeles in 1919, studied architecture at USC. Through his horticulturist father, Carter became very interested in commercial landscape although landscape architecture was not then an established profession. Carter was the first to plant flowering trees in Los Angeles’s commercial buildings, adding palm trees to for-profit landscaping. He also introduced native plants and the non-native jacaranda to public spaces. His Los Angeles projects include buildings at the LAX airport, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Century Plaza Hotel and the LA Zoo. Carter won many awards and design prizes before his death in 1989.

Date: 1973
Collection: Architecture

Location
1 Manchester Boulevard
Inglewood, California 90301