Jack Kent Cooke commissioned the Forum in the late 1960s as a new home for his Lakers basketball team and the expansion Los Angeles Kings hockey franchise, seeking independence from the downtown Memorial Sports Arena establishment. The arena opened in 1967 in Inglewood, marking a pivotal shift in the region's sports geography toward the suburbs. This timing placed the Forum squarely within the suburban-metropolitan phase of Los Angeles development, when major institutions moved outward from downtown and sports culture became integral to the region's auto-oriented identity.
Charles Luckman Associates designed the arena as an unusually pure example of New Formalism translated into mass entertainment architecture. The circular plan supports a cable-suspended roof hung from a reinforced concrete compression ring, while the exterior's giant colonnaded arcade creates the building's iconic silhouette with flared capitals that appear both classical and futuristic. The internal bowl was engineered to maximize sightlines without requiring a forest of structural supports, and the entire composition prioritizes long-distance legibility for a freeway landscape where suburban Los Angeles still demanded monuments visible from the car.