The Theme Building was designed by a consortium of three firms (Pereira & Luckman, Welton Becket, and Paul R. Williams) and completed in 1961 as the centrepiece of the rebuilt Los Angeles International Airport. It was conceived as the architectural mascot of the jet age, when LAX was being expanded into the principal Pacific gateway of the United States.
The structure is essentially a single sculptural object rather than a building in the conventional sense. Two intersecting parabolic arches, each approximately seventy-one metres long and clad in white-painted plaster over a reinforced concrete and steel armature, cross at right angles above the centre of a circular plaza. The arches spring from the ground and rise to a height of approximately forty-one metres, where they support a disc-shaped restaurant pavilion suspended at the crown of the four arches. The disc is approximately forty-one metres in diameter and visually appears to float in mid-air, an effect amplified by the fact that the actual restaurant volume hangs below the structural ring rather than resting on top of it. At ground level, a small circular building houses the lobby and the elevator core that ascends to the disc above. There is no enclosed ground floor connecting the four arch feet, so the whole composition reads at street level as four legs holding a flying saucer aloft. Structurally the form is a hybrid of arch and shell, working in compression at the haunches and resolving its lateral thrust into massive concrete footings hidden in the plaza paving.
The Theme Building is a National Historic Landmark and one of the defining structures of Googie architecture, the West Coast strand of mid-century commercial design that took its forms from atomic-age and aerospace imagery. It captures a moment in which Los Angeles imagined itself as a city of the future, and it has aged into one of the most beloved monuments of that era.