The Automobile Club of Southern California commissioned Sumner P. Hunt and Silas Reese Burns to design its monumental headquarters in 1923, at the precise moment Los Angeles achieved the highest per capita car ownership on earth. The Club, founded in 1900, had become the most powerful motoring organization in America, signing highways across the Southwest, drawing the definitive maps, and lobbying the roads into existence that would reshape Southern California. Siting this civic palace in the Adams District announced the neighborhood's prestige even as the auto-driven suburbanization the Club promoted would soon drain its mansion class to Beverly Hills. The building's patron was the agent of the district's eventual decline, an irony visible in every carefully preserved detail.
The Spanish Colonial Revival headquarters organizes itself around a garden patio, its composition anchored by a landmark tower over the corner entrance. Polychrome tile dome-caps crown the roofline while arcades define the courtyard circulation. Wrought iron grillwork punctuates the facades, but the building's glory is its tiled lobby, among the most spectacular in the city, a cathedral-like space that translates the romance of the open road into glazed ceramic and plasterwork. The architecture reads as a civic monument to the automobile, monumental in scale and civic in ambition, built with the permanence of a government institution.
