DO YOU WANT IT? OR NEED IT? DEPENDS
By Theo Douglas

There are now scads of books on populist architecture—everything from midcentury Palm Springs to vintage drive-in restaurants—but few if any single out a designer by name. Chris Nichols’ new, excellent The Leisure Architecture of Wayne McAllister is a notable exception—the reason being the man in question. Nichols, a founding member of the Los Angeles Conservancy’s Modern Committee—focused on preserving the region’s mid-20th century buildings—has in his first book explored the life and creations of one of the 20th century’s most significant yet unheralded architects.

The late Wayne McAllister designed fantastic buildings that instantly evoke a time and place, so specifically were they aimed. Nichols writes that McAllister “created the character of Southern California” (also Las Vegas), and that is true. But he knew what he was doing. The San Diego native, who died in 2000 at age 92, “had a knack for observing the changing landscape and moving with it,” Nichols writes.

McAllister never went to college, but found work directly after high school drawing up plans for bungalows. In the next 40 years, he’d create some of the West’s most significant public places, anonymous though they may be now in memory: the Agua Caliente resort in 1928 Tijuana; the glossy Sands hotel in 1950s Las Vegas—one of many he worked on there; and plan after plan for jazzy, switched-on drive-ins and coffee shops like Grisinger’s in Long Beach (now George’s ’50s Diner).

When I heard him mention them in 1998 at the Pacific Design Center, he was amazed any had survived—and that the audience cared. They were all fire-traps, he said, and it was true. But they’re all here in Technicolor print, and not to be missed.

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