Davis & Davis was a Los Angeles architectural partnership formed by brothers Francis "Pierpont" Davis and Walter Swindell Davis. Both brothers were born in Baltimore—Pierpont studied at Baltimore City College and the Maryland Institute of Design, Engineering, and Mathematics before moving to Los Angeles in 1907, while Walter earned both his bachelor's and master's degrees at MIT (1910, 1911) and arrived in LA by the mid-1910s.
The brothers teamed up in 1916, setting up shop in downtown and riding the wave of Los Angeles' 1920s building boom. Their work perfectly captures that era's love affair with historically rooted, civic-scaled architecture—think grand institutional buildings that borrowed heavily from European traditions but felt entirely at home in Southern California.
Their crown jewel? St. John's Cathedral on West Adams, originally built as St. John's Episcopal Church. This Romanesque Revival beauty opened in 1924 and later earned historic designation—a testament to how well the Davis brothers translated Old World massing and ornament into LA's emerging architectural landscape.
While Pierpont also had a notable civic profile outside architecture, the partnership's real legacy lives in their Los Angeles buildings. They understood how to take European architectural language and make it speak Southern California.
NOTABLE WORKS
St. John's Episcopal Church (1923-1925), Los Angeles – NRHP, LAHCM #516
Swelldom Building (1920), Los Angeles – NRHP
Kappa Alpha Theta Sorority House, UCLA (1930), Westwood – NRHP