Keeping Pace with Progress

In 1956, Los Angeles “voted itself a place in the sun” when residents approved a nearly $60 million expansion of Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). Pereira and Luckman, Welton Becket & Associates, and Paul R. Williams, selected as collaborators a year prior, prepared to welcome the Jet Age. Dedicated in 1961, the airport featured a decentralized plan, allowing airlines to independently operate and adjust for growth. Williams’s “beautiful, California-style, two-story passenger facilities” quintupled terminal capacity. Sitting at the center of the U-shaped layout, Pereira and Luckman’s Theme Building echoed Williams’s interest in structural expressionism. Williams continued refining LAX in the mid-1960s, overseeing passenger terminal upgrades and parking structures.

Severe traffic congestion challenged Los Angeles’s devotion to the automobile by the mid-1950s, while futuristic monorails at Disneyland and the Seattle World’s Fair inspired new possibilities for urban transit. In the 1960s, competing companies touted the monorail’s speed, affordability, and seamless integration into the cityspace compared to traditional rail. Believing architect Lester G. Scherer’s Monobeam System held promise for Los Angeles, Williams partnered with him to propose a network anchored by a World Transportation Center.

The Los Angeles Civic Center evolved through the city’s early twentieth-century growth and Depression-era contraction before culminating in a 1947 master plan. A reconfiguration of Bunker Hill allowed for an east-west expansion of a public park surrounded by stately modern architecture. A newly reconstituted Allied Architects—a distinct successor to the cooperative that realized Los Angeles City Hall in 1928—presented plans for the County Courthouse (1958; now named for Judge Stanley Mosk) and County Hall of Administration (1961; now named for former County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn). Williams and his partners executed both buildings in a restrained modern style that he considered perfectly suited for civic life: monumental without being ostentatious.

Appointed to Los Angeles’s Municipal Housing Commission in 1933, Williams helped shape the city’s housing as a population surge outpaced construction during the Great Depression and subsequent wartime and postwar boom. In the 1940s and 1950s, Williams designed three large-scale public housing projects for defense workers and low-income residents in historically Black neighborhoods: Pueblo del Rio, Hacienda Village, and Nickerson Gardens. For the first of these, Pueblo del Rio, he led a consortium of distinguished architects to develop a plan with dozens of two-story, multifamily buildings clustered around courtyards to create community green space.