The Bradbury Building was designed by George Wyman, a thirty-two-year-old draftsman with no formal architectural training, after he had reportedly consulted a ouija board. It was commissioned by the mining millionaire Lewis Bradbury and completed in 1893. The plain brown brick exterior, in a restrained Italian Renaissance Revival idiom, conceals one of the most extraordinary interiors in American architecture.
The five-storey building has an unremarkable rectangular plan but is hollowed out at its centre by a glazed light court, approximately fourteen metres wide by thirty-six metres long, that runs the full height of the building. This atrium is the entire architectural event of the design. A slightly arched skylight of iron and glass covers the court, flooding the interior with diffused daylight. The structural system is a hybrid of load-bearing brick walls on the perimeter and exposed cast-iron and steel within the atrium, which Wyman chose at the moment when the steel frame was beginning to displace masonry as the structural language of commercial architecture. The atrium balconies are railed with pierced cast iron in stylised geometric and vine motifs, manufactured at the American Bridge Company in Chicago. Two open-cage hydraulic elevators rise within the court alongside ornamental wrought-iron staircases. The floors are paved with Mexican glazed tile, the stair risers in pink Belgian marble, the wall surfaces in glazed brick, and the handrails in polished oak. The composition is essentially Victorian commercial, but the atmospheric quality of the light court anticipates the modernist celebration of daylight-filled commercial volumes.
The Bradbury Building has been a National Historic Landmark since 1977 and one of the most-photographed interiors in cinema history, having appeared in Blade Runner, Chinatown, and The Artist among many others. It is also a case study in vernacular structural innovation: at the precise moment when steel-frame skyscrapers were transforming American architecture, an untrained draftsman in Los Angeles produced a quiet masterpiece by exposing the structure he could not yet name.