Inglewood’s Public Library stands adjacent to City Hall. Charles Luckman Associates’ approach to this building includes an unusual orientation and circulation flow. A typical building entrance, at the time, opened on the property’s street address. Luckman flipped the Library to face the central plaza. Pedestrian and auto traffic journey around the site. Luckman altered the building’s access with a dramatic entry ramp to the elevated main floor lobby. A Lecture Hall is a separate building. A three-story emergency stairwell is encased in a bumped-out column on Manchester Boulevard. The Library is made of poured-in-place concrete with an innovative, multi-site public art treatment.

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 his involvement in commissioning Lever House, the first glass skyscraper on New York City’s Park Avenue, Luckman decided to return to architecture. He joined William Pereira’s Los Angeles firm. Establishing his own practice, Luckman designed the Los Angeles Convention Center, Inglewood’s Forum and New York’s Madison Square Garden. In 1946, President Harry Truman appointed Luckman to serve on 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 even though 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 commercial landscapes. He is responsible for introducing native plants and the non-native jacaranda to public spaces. His Los Angeles projects include the airport, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Century Plaza Hotel, Universal City and the Zoo. He won many awards and design prizes before his death in 1989.

Date: 1973
Collection: Architecture

Location
101 West Manchester Boulevard
Inglewood, California 90301