Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts

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The History

Beverly Hills Post Office, 1934

An Uncertain Future

Despite successfully serving the community for over six decades, the city’s postal operations eventually expanded beyond the capacities of their Crescent Drive Home, moving to a larger facility a few blocks away on North Maple Street in 1990. Officially included on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985, the Postal Service deemed the building “surplus property” in 1993. The property’s future temporarily uncertain, the City of Beverly Hills purchased the historic post office in 1999 with the intention of turning it into a cultural venue, honoring and extending the space’s civic origins.

Although the City’s board shared a common vision for the site, the project went through years of pre-development; much like the circumstances surrounding the construction of the original post office, funding was an early and constant challenge. Lou Moore, former executive director of The Wallis and responsible for overseeing the theater’s decade-plus fundraising, design, and construction cycle, ultimately raised tens of millions of dollars. Theater namesake and super-philanthropist Wallis Annenberg provided two significant contributions, initially making a $15 million gift to the organization, followed by a second of $10 million.

All told, the total cost that went into creating the center is estimated to be $75 million.

We Need a Story

Twin T's

The Goldsmith Theater

Rather than defer to the existing and surrounding architecture, our mission became to create a theater and campus inspired by the daily minutiae of the site: the processing, sorting, and delivery of mail.

The skin of the new theater is our most visible homage to this history, abstracted to represent millions of envelopes that once defined the site: 4’x 9’ envelope-shaped copper-colored concrete panels1 are repeated across the façade. Each “envelope” is slightly different (some flat, some closed, some turned out to the front) and irregularly patterned, giving the building a thoroughly modern aesthetic, distinct, but importantly not aloof from the post office: not only does the abstraction refer back to the old building historically, the copper of the concrete panels reflects the terra cotta color as well.

—Goldsmith Theater, view from the stage

We viewed this skin functionally as “the final curtain” of the Goldsmith Theater (named after the Wallis’ Founding Chairman, the late banker and philanthropist Bram Goldsmith), as it conceals much of the building’s mechanical equipment on giant shelves hidden in the folds of the exterior cladding. In wrapping the skin so thoroughly it gives singular form to a structure that otherwise would be perceived as separate elements.

The 500-seat theater (350 on the ground floor, 150 in the balcony) is lined with acoustically and visually transparent wood paneling buffered further from the sounds of the street by dense concrete walls. A lobby juts from the theater’s rear, overlooking a courtyard and sculpture garden2 and connected to the post office through a walkway and below-grade staircase.

—Goldsmith Theater, view from the seats

A Post Office Restored

Inside the post office we executed extensive preservation and restoration work, including but certainly not limited to: a re-roofing effort consisting of salvaging and reinstalling existing Roman-style glazed terracotta tiles, the mending and reactivation of a hidden gutter system behind the eaves, artisan-level refurnishing of slip-glazed bricks and selective repointing of mortar, and re-finishing historic ironwork. In the former atrium-now-Wallis grand lobby, we diligently restored eight historic murals by noted PWA-era artist Charles Kassler3.

Designed to complement the new Goldsmith Theater, we repurposed the building to hold various support spaces, including administrative offices, an education wing, and various back of house areas such as dressing rooms and costume shops. The original mail sorting room has been converted into the 150-seat auxiliary Lovelace Studio Theater, designed as a flexible stage suited for new and smaller work, black box, cabaret, workshops, student performances, and rehearsals.

'A Dream in an Envelope'

The Wallis Annenberg Performing Arts Center officially opened on October 17^th, 2013, the occasion marked by a lavish opening-night gala under the theme “A Dream in an Envelope”. The glamorous affair included a number of dance and musical performances, live readings of vintage letters that had passed through the post office decades past (written by Tennessee Williams, Groucho Marx, and Tchaikovsky, recited by Diane Lane and John Lithgow, among others), a dinner catered by Wolfgang Puck (filet mignon over white truffle risotto), and a live fashion show by the evening’s sponsor, the Italian design brand Salvatore Ferragamo.

Despite the large number of celebs in attendance—including Sidney Poitier, Jodie Foster, Charlize Theron and Gwen Stefani—the LA Times wrote the next day that the “real star of the evening was the U.S. Postal system itself, not to mention the range of theatrical experiences one can expect to see in the coming years across the two stages of the $70-million, 2.5 acre performing arts campus.”

Productions since the inaugural 2013/14 season have included Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along and Into the Woods and Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night; perhaps most notably, the Wallis was the Los Angeles home of Deaf West Theater’s Tony-Award nominated production of Spring Awakening, which opened in May 2015 before moving to Broadway later that fall.

Notes

• 1

  Made out of Swis­s­pearl cement boards, we redesigned the façade to alter the size and mod­u­la­tion of the ​“gaps” between pan­els, result­ing in 30% sav­ings in mate­r­i­al. Swis­s­pearl is made com­posed of nat­ur­al raw mate­ri­als from Switzer­land and are ​“man­u­fac­tured with low ener­gy con­sump­tion and a high lev­el of envi­ron­men­tal awareness.”

• 2

  An ear­ly head­line of the gar­den was the col­or­ful 30-foot sculp­ture by Roy Licht­en­stein Coups de Pinceau, 1988. Tem­porar­i­ly installed in Novem­ber 2013, the sculp­ture was relo­cat­ed to the Licht­en­stein foun­da­tion in New York City in July 2017.

• 3

  The murals on the walls above the mar­ble were com­mis­sioned by the Trea­sury Depart­ment under two dif­fer­ent con­tracts. Paint­ed as fres­coes, there were actu­al­ly 8 lunettes, one on each end of the room, ​“Post Rid­er” and ​“Air Mail”, and three on each the north and south sides of the room which as a com­plete paint­ing were enti­tled ​“Con­struc­tion – PWA”. The murals on the north and south were part of the Trea­sury Relief Art Project which as cre­at­ed to employ artists dur­ing the Depres­sion. The Kassler mur­al is the only PWA effort in the state of Cal­i­for­nia that shows depres­sion-era unem­ploy­ment prob­lems. The sub­ject mat­ter was not cho­sen to crit­i­cize the gov­ern­ment, but rather to under­score the virtues of the New Deal and to show ​“the administration’s effort to solve the unem­ploy­ment problem.”