Coca-Cola Building

Stanley Barbee, president of the Coca-Cola Company of Southern California, wanted to consolidate the existing bottling plant buildings at the corner of East 14th St. and South Central Ave. in Los Angeles into one unified structure. Barbee hired architect Robert Derrah, who had recently completed Los Angeles’s first outdoor shopping mall, the Crossroads of the World (1936), to remodel the buildings and create a new unifying facade. The resulting Streamline Moderne building affects an oceanliner, complete with a flying bridge, promenade deck and portholes. Reasons for the specific, programmatic expression of the style as a ship vary from musings on “one of America’s most complete adaptations of the imagery of the transportation machine to an architectural problem” to Barbee being an enthusiastic yachtsman. It was designated a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 1975.

Los Angeles, Los Angeles County
Photographer: John Bare