Building houses for Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant and Lucille Ball made Williams a design star. A trio of new exhibitions suggests he deserves to be counted among the great architects of the 20th century.
When flying into Los Angeles airport, LAX, a strange artefact from the space age is the first thing to greet the eye from the window. Built in the early 1960s, the Theme Building—which once drew travellers with its integrated restaurant, designed by Walt Disney Imagineering, rising above the runways—was built by a stellar group of architects whose buildings helped define the mid-century aesthetic of the city: William Pereira, Welton Becket, Charles Luckman and Paul Revere Williams.
Of these architects, Williams, California's first licensed African American architect, probably shaped the contours of Los Angeles most profoundly. In the six decades before his death in 1980, Williams completed approximately 3,000 projects ranging from single-family residences, commercial buildings, affordable housing projects, the Los Angeles County Courthouse, a renovation of the now-demolished Ambassador Hotel and lavish mansions for celebrities such as Frank Sinatra, Barbara Stanwyck, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.
Perhaps the most iconic of all is the Beverly Hills Hotel. Williams oversaw its renovation and the distinctive scroll-shaped sign is written in Williams's own handwriting.
