The Dominguez–Wilshire Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Morgan, Walls & Clements, and built between 1928 and 1930 in Los Angeles, CA.
Its precise street address is 5410 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA. You can also find it on the map here.
The building underwent a major restoration in 2000.
Morgan, Walls & Clements was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.
But that's not all, there was also a whole team of architects involved, which included: Stiles Oliver Clements, Octavius Weller Morgan, and John A. Walls.
That being said, architecture is a complex discipline involving many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but at the very least we know that there was one other part involved, that was the Dominguez family as the Main Developer.
The Dominguez–Wilshire Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.
The Art Deco movement flourished during the 1920s and 1930s, with many historians marking the outbreak of World War II as its final decline. Even though a couple of decades might not seem as much, the Art Deco movement had a great impact on architecture, and it's widely represented in many American cities due to the development boom that happened during that time.
Art Deco marked the abandonment of traditional historicism and the embracement of modern living and the age of the machine. In architecture, that meant leaving behind the ornaments of Beux-Arts and Neo-Gothic buildings and instead favoring simplicity and visual impact through geometric shapes, clean lines, and symmetrical designs. Ornaments were still an important part of the design, but they became bold and lavish, and were often inspired by ancient cultures or industrial imagery, instead of nature.
The Dominguez–Wilshire Building was completed in 1930, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.
Ever since opening its doors to the public in 1930, the Dominguez–Wilshire Building has mainly been used as Commercial space.
The Dominguez–Wilshire Building uses a frame structure made of reinforced concrete columns and slabs.
A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.
From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a vertical pattern characteristic of the art-deco movement, with several setbacks towards the top of the building. Today the facade is mostly painted white, with dark colored spandrels. This color scheme is recent though, it happened during the 2000 restoration. Before that, the building was painted in a dark sand color, with lighter spandrels and golden details. Those details are also dark colored now, matching the spandrels.
