AKA: Mines Field, Westchester, Los Angeles, CA

Structure Type: built works - infrastructure - transportation structures - airports

Designers: Pereira and Luckman, Architects, Engineers and Planners (firm); Williams, Paul R. and Associates (firm); Charles Irving Luckman Sr. (architect); William Leonard Pereira (architect); David Perini (building contractor); Paul Revere Williams (architect)

Dates: constructed 1928

Sepulveda Boulevard
Westchester, Los Angeles, CA

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Three huge architecture firms collaborated on the design of the new LAX in the late 1950s-early 1960s: Welton Becket and Associates (the largest firm in the US at the time), Paul R. Williams, and Charles Luckman and William Pereira. Luckman and Pereira's dissolved their partnership while LAX was being designed and constructed; the final credit is sometimes given to Charles Luckman and Associates.

640 acres of wheat, lima bean and barley fields are set aside by the Los Angeles City Council as the site of what will become Los Angeles International Airport; William W. Mines, a local real estate agent, brokered the deal; the Graf Zeppelin moored at this field on its way from Japan in 1929;

Periera and Luckman, Architects-Engineers, of Los Angeles, CA, created a new masterplan and terminal building design for LAX c. 1953. The airport underwent a huge enlargement in the early 1960s. An advertisement for Executone Sound Systems in 1962 provided a drawing of the 265-acre site, that included 1 million square feet of building space. (See "Executone sound chosen by all 17 Airlines at new Los Angeles International Airport," Architectural Forum, 117, 07/1962, p. 14-15.) At this time, the world's tallest flight control tower (at 172 feet) and the space-age Theme Building were erected. Another enlargement occurred in the 1980s, with the Perini Corporation (a diversified building construction firm), involved as a contractor.

PCAD id: 3467