|
|
Welton BecketWelton Becket (1902-1969) was an architect who designed many of the most famous buildings in Hollywood and Los Angeles, California. He was born in Seattle, Washington. Becket's extensive list of credits includes the Theme Building at LAX, The Capitol Tower, the Cinerama Dome, the Los Angeles Music Center (including the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion), the master plan for Century City, the Beverly Hilton, and the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Becket settled in Los Angeles in 1933 and formed a partnership with his University of Washington classmate Walter Wurdeman and Angelean architect Charles F. Plummer. Their first major commission was the landmark Moderne Pan-Pacific Auditorium in 1935, which won them residential jobs from James Cagney, Robert Montgomery, and other film celebrities. Plummer died in 1939. The successor firm Wurdeman and Becket went on to design Bullock's Pasadena (1944) and a couple of corporate headquarters. Wurdeman and Becket developed the concept of 'total design', meaning that their firm should be responsible for master planning, engineering, interiors, furniture, fixtures, landscaping, signage, down to menus, silverware, matchbooks, and napkins. Wurdeman's untimely death in 1949, Becket formed Welton Becket Associates and continued to relentlessly grow the firm. Most active in the 1950's and 60's, Becket's architectural work is characterized by a straightforward, 'businesslike' design approach that prioritized his clients' requirements over developing a recognizable signature style for himself. Recenty the work of his firm has been cited as an important 'mid-Century modern' reference point. Reportedly he told one interviewer, "I see no reason to express Welton Becket." At the time of Becket's death in 1969, his architectural firm was the largest in the world. Becket's firm co-designed (with Disney and US Steel) the 1971 Contemporary Resort Hotel at Disneyworld, the one with a monorail through the Portmanesque atrium. The Contemporary was designed as a 10-story steel A-frame; modular guest rooms were assembled, finished, furnished, fully equipped down to Gideon Bibles and toilet paper, and their doors locked, on the ground, then lifted by crane and inserted into the frame like a dresser drawer. This was to give Disney the ability to rapidly 'un-plug' and re-furnish rooms at will. Unfortunately the steel frame settled and trapped the original rooms into their original positions. When architect Lawrence Bradford Perkins had an appointment with Eero Saarinen to meet Welton Becket, Perkins asked Saarinen what sort of man Becket was. Saarinen said, "Well, I will tell you, but you must not repeat this. If you and he were sitting on a cake of ice in the arctic waiting to be rescued, he would eat you before he was even hungry." Welton's son Bruce Becket is also a practicing architect.
External links
|
 |