In 2014, we published our first Snobby Tours® Travelblog article on The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, more often referred to as "The Wallis", shortly after it opened to the public in October of 2013.
The Wallis, the first performing arts center to be built in City of Beverly Hills, transformed an entire Beverly Hills city block near the Civic Center into a vibrant new cultural destination with TWO distinct, elegant buildings -- and was completed in time for its 2013-2014 Inaugural Season to correspond with Beverly Hills' Centennial Celebration marking the 100th birthday of the City's incorporation.
The most notable of the two buildings is the much loved historic 1933 Italianate-style Beverly Hills Post Office built as a WPA project during the Franklin Roosevelt administration. For decades some of Beverly Hills' most recognizable residents from film and television kept post office boxes there, such as Fred Astaire and Jimmy Stewart.
Also in 2013, the City of Beverly Hills designated the Beverly Hills Post Office as a historical landmark, under the City's new Historic Preservation Ordinance. The building had previously received designation on the National Register of Historic Places by the US Department of the Interior.
Seven years later, in 2021, we "revisited" The Wallis in an update for our Travelblog, and explored its interesting architectural additions to the original Post Office building.
A striking 70,000 sq. ft. building, The Wallis itself is an excellent example of "constructivism architecture", a futuristic-looking style which developed in the 1920s and 1930s in the former Soviet Union that combined technology and engineering, and applied a 3-dimensional Cubist vision to entire abstract non-objective constructions by adding a kinetic element.
Although this movement in artistic expression borrowed ideas from the Cubism and Futurism movements, the interpretation in architectural expression for The Wallis superimposed ideas from the Bauhaus, Suprematism and Neo-Plasticism movements.
The façade of The Wallis, comprised of fiber cement, is evocative of envelopes being sorted -- an homage to the historic Post Office on the same site.
During the past 10 years, The Wallis has garnered six prestigious architectural awards, including a Los Angeles Architectural Civic Award and an AIA California Council Merit Award for Design in the Adaptive Reuse/Renovation/Historic Preservation category. The original 1933 Post Office building contains eight towering fresco murals which are one of two sets of WPA frescos remaining in the entire California Federal Building system.
Additionally, The Wallis has come to be recognized as a dynamic cultural hub and community resource where local, national, and international artists share their artistry with ever-expanding audiences. Distinguished by its eclectic programming that mirrors the diverse landscape of Los Angeles and its location in the entertainment capital of the world, The Wallis has produced and presented more than 400 theater, dance, music, film, cabaret, comedy, performance arts, and family entertainment programs, boasting nominations for 79 Ovation Awards, and for 9 L.A. Drama Critics Circle Awards.
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(Primary sources and photo credits: thewallis.org; stageandcinema.com; archdaily.com; spfa.com; John Edward Linden Photography)
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