Dramatic photos and fascinating text explore the rich angular ornament, towers, graphics, and exaggerated works created by architects and designers in 1920s to 1940s Los Angeles. Students and admirers of the Art Deco and Streamline styles will delight in the remarkable array of public buildings, office towers, theaters, restaurants, religious structures, apartments, hotels, and individual homes. Many of the leading architects of the era are featured, including Claude Beelman; Morgan, Walls & Clements; A.C. Martin; Walker & Eisen: and John & Donald B. Parkinson. Celebrating populist, progressive, machine-age Los Angeles, this wonderful book showcases the two main categories of Art Deco styles: the zigzag, perpendicular Deco style of the 1920s and the aerodynamic, cubist style of the Streamline 1930s and early `40s. Allied to these are the many L.A. works known as PWA and Classical Moderne, as well as the playful Regency Moderne. With both exterior and interior views, this is an essential reference and a stunning tribute to architectural expression in Los Angeles.

The drama and beauty of historic homes in California are studied and displayed here in a deeply researched text and over 350 stunning color and over 50 black and white photographs. Southern California's Spanish Revival monuments are pictured here-such as Hearst Castle at San Simeon, the Adamson House in Malibu, Casa del Herrero in Montecito. You will enjoy Rancho Revival landmarks like the Lummis House on Pasadena's arroyo, and Will Rogers' ranch near Pacific Palisades. These are all different portrayals of the California Colonial, its romantic past and its manner of settling into California's climate and landscape. Vernacular and religious structures built between 1769 and 1848, during the Spanish Mission and Mexican Rancho eras, gave California its unique character; a look that was subsequently fictionalized in the revival architecture produced since those colonial days. Particularly influential on residential work, the colonial styles have indulged in the rich associations with Spain's culture-employing styles and ornament from the country's provincial Andalusian, Plateresco, Churrigueresco, and Desornamentado styles and its ever-present Mudejar crafts-or burrowed into its rustic pioneer roots and depicted as individual visions of earthy rancho haciendas.