One Bunker Hill

One Bunker Hill. . , "Power Personified In Stone…" , In downtown Los Angeles, there's power , the kind wielded from boardrooms and corner offices , and there's power , the kind that illuminates lightbulbs and warms houses. , Two buildings , one high Art Deco, the other highly modern , that stand opposite each other concentrate that power at the downtown corner of Grand Avenue and Fifth Street. , The Southern California Edison Building, now called One Bunker Hill, was a marvel of its age, the first building in the west to be completely heated, cooled, and fueled by electricity, from its clocks to its system of pneumatic message tubes. Construction was begun in 1930, the first full year of the Depression. , Its entrance, at an offset angle to the street corner, is composed of three geometric archways, each topped with relief figures designed by sculptor Merrill Gage. They represent Light, Power, and Hydro Electric Energy, each one allegorically stylized, each like a Prometheus bringing fire to mankind. , The most astonishing space within its 12 stories is the lobby, soaring 40 feet to coffered ceilings ornamented with chevrons and gilded rosettes, the rest of it vivid with 17 varieties of marble and travertine columns. It is so compelling an interior that filmmakers of such movies as "48 Hours" and both "Arthur" and "Mac Arthur" shot scenes in its 13,000 square feet. , The piece de resistance, uniting such figures critical to the evolution of electricity as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison, is the lobby mural "The Apotheosis of Power," by Hugo Ballin, whose work adorned more than 100 films and, more durably, is found in the Griffith Park Observatory and other locations. , Blue Flame And Bright Water , Just across the street stands the Gas Company Tower, designed by Richard Keting of the firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, an edifice as advanced for its time , 1991 , as the Edison Building was in its era. , Company Tower is surprisingly playful , an underfoot water garden of fountains playing beneath see-through flooring like an underground spring. , Its glass walls afford a near-perfect view of the adjoining Pacific Bel/AT&T south wall, where artist Frank Stella created "Dusk” in 1991. The 300-foot-long work , long as a football field , was commissioned by the Gas Company Tower to help fulfill the city's Percent for Art program, which requires such projects to put 1% of their budgets into public art. Stella's mural, the largest work he had undertaken, was "blown up” from a montage of paper and photographs of metal construction. It covers 40,000 square feet, and is part of his "Moby Dick” series; indeed from the Gas Company Tower lobby, it feels as if the viewer is inside the painting , or perhaps the whale (Stella himself says the series has more to do with travel and motion than the Melville novel).