Title Guarantee and Trust Company Building

The Title Guarantee and Trust Company Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Parkinson & Parkinson, and built between 1929 and 1931, for a reported $1.25 million dollars, in Los Angeles, CA.

Its precise street address is 401-411 W. 5th Street, Los Angeles, CA. You can also find it on the map here.

The Title Guarantee and Trust Company 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 Title Guarantee and Trust Company Building was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on July 26^th 1984, and was also included in the Los Angeles Register of Historic Places on November 7^th 1984.

Parkinson & Parkinson 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 here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the Title Guarantee and Trust Company Building a reality:

• Walker, P.J., and Company as the Main Contractor
• Title Guaranty and Trust Company as the Main Developer
• Hugo Ballin/Einar Petersen as the collaborating Artist

The Title Guarantee and Trust Company Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Title Guarantee and Trust Company Building was completed in 1931, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Title Guarantee and Trust Company Building 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 clear glazed terracotta coating that rises above a granite base. The pillars framing the recessed windows rise towards the prominent gothic-style tower accentuating the verticality of the structure.