Chinese Pagoda Meets Alien Spacecraft Up on the Roof

The Los Angeles area’s most beautiful gas station is located at the corner of Little Santa Monica Boulevard and North Crescent Drive in Beverly Hills.

It’s not that it is the greatest building around, it’s just that it doesn’t have much competition for that title. Most gas stations are just ratty little pieces of asphalt hiding under some rather massive umbrella made out of an indistinctly metallic material that hides behind garish advertising. The genius of this structure is that it reduces that situation to its elemental form and then turns it into a heroic gesture of liberation.

The Union 76 station was designed in 1965 by Pereira and Luckman, two architects who have been responsible for many confident and zippy modern buildings around town. Here they were liberated from the constraints of having to find room for a great deal of functions and obviously felt that the quasi-mechanical purpose of the building gave them license to do something expressive.

They chose to make a canopy and leave it at that. True, there is a small building of concrete block and glass hunkering down under that roof, and there are gas pumps, but they are only undesigned incidents in a sea of asphalt.

The canopy, however, is another matter. It is almost a hundred feet long, triangular and curves up at the edges. With its Union Oil-orange squares that march down its upturned sides and its bands of fluorescent lights that zip up its belly, it looks like a cross between a Chinese pagoda and an alien spacecraft. It is both a giant piece of advertising and an abstract shape that speaks of speed and efficiency. The three lozenge-shaped columns that do hold it up seem to be holding onto it with all their might, as if this concrete umbrella might zoom away with the Thunderbirds and GTOs it was no doubt designed to serve.

The roof defines different areas with one simple gesture. Its corners gesture down the road, its belly creates a brightly lighted and relatively low oasis from that road, and its rear defines the shop without enclosing it. The versatility and subtlety of this little chunk is remarkable, especially since it seems at first glance so alien.

On a more abstract level, this gas station speaks of the place of the car in our city. Because it is a stopping place for those tooling down the great American highway, you expect to exit from this paean to automotive excess directly onto a freeway. Instead, you have to insert yourself in the creeping procession of Rolls-Royces and Mercedes-Benzes making their way out of downtown Beverly Hills. The back of the Italianate Post Office and the front of the Civic Center are just across the corner. The Union 76 station is marooned in the middle of polite and tasteful architecture, and at times seems completely out of context with these restrained structures.

The virtue of the design is that it gives a face to the Beverly Hills that you aren’t supposed to see: the brick wall to its south, the alley to the west, and the jumble of fences, backs of buildings and service technologies that make all the facades of this city work so nicely--the world of service and technology, including the car. The needs of the car reveal a whole other city than that of static facades.

Architects and artists once believed that we needed to invent a style that would give an appropriate appearance to those textures, colors and activities of everyday life, rather than trying to cover them up with fantasies from faraway times and places. It may not be beautiful, but every time I come zooming around the curve where Burton Way becomes Little Santa Monica, I am glad to find this welcoming gesture before Beverly Hills closes down on me.