Eastern Columbia Building

The Eastern Columbia Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Curlett & Beelman, and built between 1930 and 1930, for a reported $1.25 million dollars, in Los Angeles, CA.

Eastern Columbia Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as Eastern Columbia Lofts.

Its precise street address is 849 S. Broadway, Los Angeles, CA. You can also find it on the map here.

The Eastern Columbia Building is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Los Angeles and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the Art Deco style. Because of that, the Eastern Columbia Building was officially included in the Los Angeles Register of Historic Places in 1985.

The building underwent a major restoration between 2004 and 2006. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Killefer Flammang Architects.

Curlett & Beelman was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

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 J. V. McNeil Company as the Main Contractor.

The Eastern Columbia Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Eastern Columbia 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.

The Eastern Columbia Building uses a frame structure made of reinforced concrete columns and beams.

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.

The facade is non-load bearing either, as it is common in frame structure type buildings.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a glossy terra cotta tiles cladding which gives the building it's iconic image through it's palette of turquoise and other blue-green shades. This rather unique tones brilliantly contrast with the black spandrels and golden accents to create a sense of verticality and one of the most recognizable and admired facades of american art-deco. To complete this iconic image, the buildign is topped with a four-sided clock tower, where the word "EASTERN" shines in bright white neon above each of the four clocks..