Richfield Tower

The Richfield Tower is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Morgan, Walls and Clements, with Stiles Oliver Clements as lead architect, and built between 1928 and 1929, for a reported $1.75 million dollars, in Los Angeles, CA.

Richfield Tower is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as Richfield Oil Company Building.

The exact addresss of the building was 555 South Flower Street, Los Angeles, CA. However, you won't be able to find it there anymore, since it was demolished in 1969, 40 year after opening its doors to the public.

At the site where the Richfield Tower used to stand, today we find the ARCO Plaza complex, later renamed City National Plaza.

The only thing left from the Richfield Tower are the intricate elevator doors which were preserved as a memento in the City National Tower.

At the time of its completion in 1929 the Richfield Tower incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included an automobile elevator .

Morgan, Walls and Clements, with Stiles Oliver Clements as the lead architect, was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design. But there was also one other architect involved, as far as we know. We are talking about .

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 here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the Richfield Tower a reality:

• Walker Company as the Main Contractor
• Richfield Oil Company as the Main Developer
• Haig Patigian as the collaborating Artist

The Richfield Tower can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Richfield Tower 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 Richfield Tower uses a frame structure made of steel columns and concrete 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.

The facade is a non-load bearing masonry facade. This type of facade became common during the period when buildings, especially taller ones, transitioned from load-bearing wall systems to frame structures.

Frame structures allowed facades to be independent from the building's frame, enabling the use of lighter materials and larger openings. However, it took some time for architects to incorporate these new posibilities into their designs, and so for a while they simply replicated the look and feel fo buildings people where used to seeing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a black and gold, glazed terracotta clad. This color palette alluded to the oil, sometimes referred to as "black gold", industry that made the Richfield Oil Company so much money.

The top of the building was adorned with floral motifs and geometric patterns crown the facade..

Other materials found at the Richfield Tower include, bronze , seen in black and gold elaborate elevator doors, and marble, used in the lobby bank elevators.