Still standing: The Theme Building, Los Angeles International Airport 1961 – ADC

There’s a sphinx in Los Angeles. Like its Egyptian counterpart, it’s a peculiar hybrid of art and architecture, and it sits in a similar situation, abandoned and half-destroyed, passed daily by flocks of eager tourists. It even has (like its winged, ancient Greek cousin) a sort of riddle connected with it: Where do people want to stay in a place that’s built for leaving?

The Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) is not—has never been—one of the world’s great travel facilities. Too remote for convenience, too central for adequate expansion, the fifth-largest airport in the United States by passenger volume is totally unconnected to any form of public transit (at least until later this year, when the long-awaited K line is expected to debut), making it one of the most traffic jam-prone locales in a city famous for them. The only comprehensive plan for its modern use was conceived over six decades ago and has long outlived its shelf life; almost every improvement since then has been purely cosmetic, including a series of curious glowing pylons meant to serve as an artistic ‘gateway’ between the city and the world. In truth they only make the whole process of getting in and out a stranger and more distracting experience. But they’re not the biggest mystery of the 1416-hectare complex.

No, the truly sphinx-ish figure on campus is right at the centre: a 25-metre-tall saucer, straight out of a 50s Poverty Row sci-fi, straddled by two perpendicular arches that connect to the central disc via thin concrete ligaments. Plopped down smack in the middle of the horseshoe roadway that connects the nine passenger terminals, this is the Theme Building— though what exactly the ‘theme’ is supposed to be has never been properly explained. One of the city’s most recognisable structures, the poster child for SoCal’s endemic ‘Googie’ style of midcentury architecture, it is also a complete unknown, a perpetual enigma both practically and symbolically.

Its many ambiguities begin with its creation. The collective behind the 1961 masterplan for LAX was a comic-book superhero team of Southern California modernism: nominally led by the firm of Luckman & Pereira—designers, together and separately, of Cali classics like San Francisco’s Trans America Building and Anaheim’s Disneyland Hotel—the airport group also included Welton Becket & Associates—they of the Capitol Records Building, among other La-La landmarks— and perhaps most surprisingly, Paul R. Williams, creator of glamorous Hollywood homes for Lucille Ball and Frank Sinatra among others, and almost indisputably the most successful and high-profile African[1]American architect of his generation. The group appears to have been assembled somewhat ad hoc by the city’s Department of Airports, with the Luckman offce appointed as primary designers for the original scheme eight years before its completion; the other collaborators, brought in along the way, may have been intended to augment the lead studio’s near-total lack of experience in creating airports, except that neither Williams nor Becket had ever designed one either.

Compounding the confusion, there is no absolute certainty as to who among the group was chiefly responsible for the Theme Building itself. It appears to be a relic of Luckman’s original proposal for a vaguely Bucky Fuller-ish dome covering the entire central swath of the facility, intended as its primary entryway and terminal. This idea was eventually scrapped—as, incidentally, was the Luckman and Pereira partnership, another potential factor in forming the oddball mix of designers whose names were eventually tied to the project. What they came up with is a little concrete spaceship, nine metres in diameter, with the arches meeting 41 metres over the saucer and providing only nominal support to it, that job being largely done by the central trunk below. Originally housing a restaurant and upper-level viewing platform, the building was intended to provide diners and guests with a stunning panoramic prospect of the air traffic; what it ultimately gave them was a depressing, hard-to-get-to view of the automobile traffic: marooned in the middle of the gigantic parking concourse, the building was never easily accessible from the terminals, and as the latter expanded and multiplied the airplanes receded further and further into the distance.

Every attempt at operating the Theme Building as a food-and-beverage amenity for harried air travelers has run aground, most recently in 2013, when the Encounter restaurant closed its doors (or rather its elevator). The ground floor remains open as an outpost of military-personnel support group the United Service Organization, and periodic tours do ascend up to the viewing platform, but other than that the only theme playing in the building now is a long, endless dirge. So what was it supposed to be about? Certainly one infers that the Theme Building was meant to evoke certain feelings: something do with flight, and the future, and the romance of travel. In retrospect however, the building seems more than anything like a monument to Tinseltown’s Swinging Sixties glamour, and to the lost opportunities of the American Space Age — with the presence of Williams seeming especially poignant, a signal of the equitable, progressive future that never quite arrived. Any way you look at it, it is a familiar theme.