Near the end of writer/director Stephen Gee’s film Iconic Vision: John Parkinson, Architect of Los Angeles—which premiered on PBS SoCal in July and is now airing across the country—narrator John Grunewald says, rather matter of factly, “His name might not be familiar to many Los Angeles citizens, yet John Parkinson and Los Angeles are forever entwined.” That lack of local familiarity is undeniable at the national level. In an architectural conversation with a solid eastward tilt, we rarely talk about Southern California’s built environment or the people responsible for it (except when Frank Gehry comes to town). So if Iconic Vision is an eye-opening introduction for Angelenos, it’s revelatory for the rest of us.
Over a 45-year period, Parkinson helped turn L.A.—barely a city when he arrived in 1894—into a metropolis with a place on the global urban stage. He designed the Laughlin Building, the city’s first steel-frame structure (1896); the city’s first skyscraper, the 12-story Braly Block, now called the Continental Building (1904); and the Wholesale Terminal Market (1917). The University of Southern California campus, as it exists today, is Parkinson’s work, including the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum (1932). He designed the city’s iconic City Hall (1928), the Art Deco masterpiece Bullocks Wilshire department store (1929), and the indelible, Spanish mission-style Union Station (1939).
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