Long Beach Professional Building

The Long Beach Professional Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by William Douglas Lee, and built between 1929 and 1929 in Los Angeles, CA.

Long Beach Professional Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as Regency Palms Long Beach.

Its precise street address is 117 E. 8th Street, Los Angeles, CA. You can also find it on the map here.

The Long Beach Professional 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 Long Beach Professional Building was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on June 20^th 2005, and was also included in the Los Angeles Register of Historic Places in 1988.

The building has been restored 2 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1962 and 2018.

William Douglas Lee was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

The Long Beach Professional Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Long Beach Professional Building was completed in 1929, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Long Beach Professional Building uses a frame structure made of 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 of the building however, is load bearing. This doesn't imply that it is a traditional load-bearing wall. Rather, it means that the structure's exterior pillars have been pushed to the very edges, becoming integrated with the facade, and therefore, technically, a part of it.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features slabs of polished black granite cover the lower part of the building, which is decorated with floral and abstract designs carved into the concrete, particularly at the cornice level, surrounding the flat roof, below the eighth-floor windows, and between the windows of the second and third floors.

During the last renovation, a canopy was added that matches the scale of the building and evokes the original canopy.

Other materials found at the Long Beach Professional Building include, marble, found in the entrance lobby walls and geometric design floors, and brass, used in mailbox and elevators cabs.