Century City, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Century City in Los Angeles, California.

Century City is a modernist enclave where West Los Angeles's metropolitan character meets a former studio backlot, concentrated high-rise architecture and a purpose-built commercial district conceived as a second urban center west of Downtown.

Positioned between Westwood, Beverly Hills, and Cheviot Hills, the neighborhood occupies a compact section of the Westside where a concentrated skyline rises abruptly above lower residential districts and the Santa Monica Boulevard corridor. Broad landscaped avenues, freestanding towers, geometric plazas and carefully spaced building masses create a physical composition conceived at district scale, giving the neighborhood an architectural coherence unusual within Los Angeles. Avenue of the Stars supplies the primary encounter through the central high-rise corridor, with towers framing long sightlines across the planned street grid. Century Park East and Century Park West create a secondary spatial structure around the core, separating major building groups and reinforcing the district's unusual concentration of vertical development. The result is a neighborhood whose unmistakable form emerged from the deliberate conversion of filmmaking acreage into one of Los Angeles's most ambitious experiments in postwar metropolitan architecture.

What you should know about Century City.

Century City is best known for occupying land transformed from the 20th Century Fox backlot into a master-planned urban center whose development joined Hollywood economics with the architectural ambitions of postwar Los Angeles. William Fox acquired land west of Los Angeles from the Janss Corporation during the 1920s, and the property became part of the studio complex that expanded after Fox Film Corporation merged with Twentieth Century Pictures in 1935. Financial pressure at the studio during the 1950s prompted consideration of real-estate development across the backlot, opening hundreds of acres to an entirely new use. Welton Becket and Associates prepared an early master plan during that decade, presenting a development concept in 1958 built around office towers, residences, retail space, hotels and landscaped public areas. New York developer William Zeckendorf secured an option on the property in 1959, then joined with Aluminum Company of America as financing and ownership arrangements evolved. A 1961 transaction transferred a large portion of the property from Fox, with the studio retaining its production acreage in the southwest sector. Alcoa subsequently assumed control of the development and retained Becket's firm for a revised plan organized into quadrants by Avenue of the Stars and Olympic Boulevard. Residential towers occupied the southeast, commercial development concentrated elsewhere and Fox continued studio operations along the southern edge. Demolition of the old backlot cleared the way for a district conceived through coordinated buildings, plazas, fountains, landscaping and circulation, turning film-production terrain into a new concentration of corporate Los Angeles.

Minoru Yamasaki gave the emerging district a separate architectural chapter through three buildings that became central components of the Century City skyline. The Century Plaza Hotel opened in 1966 as the centerpiece of a development promoted at $50 million, its 19-story crescent combining repetitive concrete balconies with Yamasaki's developing New Formalist approach. The architect returned for Century Plaza Towers, completed in 1975 as matching triangular office buildings whose dark vertical elements and aluminum cladding emphasized height across sharply angular footprints. A later generation of corporate architecture arrived with Fox Plaza, completed in 1986 from a design associated with William Pereira and Johnson Fain architects Scott Johnson and Bill Fain. Its 34 stories rise through faceted planes of pink-toned granite and gray glass, with increasingly complex stepped volumes toward the crown. Fox Plaza subsequently became Nakatomi Plaza in Die Hard, returning part of Century City's corporate skyline to screen production decades after the original backlot had disappeared beneath the district. The building's cinematic role created an unusual historical loop: acreage relinquished by a film studio for urban development ultimately produced architecture absorbed back into Hollywood's visual repertoire.

How to fold Century City into your trip.

Century City works as the anchor for an outing connecting a pioneering public golf course, an institution devoted to Holocaust education and the former cultural space that made photography the subject of a dedicated Los Angeles exhibition center.

Begin at Rancho Park Golf Course, an 18-hole municipal course designed by William Johnson and William P. Bell on rolling terrain immediately south of the Century City skyline. The course opened with the 1949 U.S.G.A. Public Links Championship, immediately connecting a new municipal facility with national competition. Its par-71 layout extends 6,839 yards, with elevation changes and compact greens preserving the strategic qualities of Johnson and Bell's design. Rancho Park subsequently hosted eighteen Los Angeles Opens, placing Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and other leading professionals on a public course during the tournament's long association with the Westside. LPGA and senior events continued that competitive history between 1978 and 1994, giving the property a sporting chronology spanning multiple professional circuits. Continue to Museum of Tolerance, created by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and opened in February 1993 as an institution addressing the Holocaust, antisemitism and prejudice through interactive exhibition design. The museum emerged amid increasing concern over Holocaust denial and opened a year after the 1992 Los Angeles unrest, placing its educational mission within both international history and the city's immediate social context. More than eight million people have entered since opening, including millions of students participating in its educational programs. Conclude at Annenberg Space for Photography, which the Annenberg Foundation opened under Wallis Annenberg's vision on March 27, 2009 as the first Los Angeles cultural destination devoted exclusively to photography. Its interior translated camera components into architecture: a circular digital gallery occupied the center like a convex element inside a camera, an aperture-shaped ceiling defined the room above and a curved print gallery recalled film moving through a canister. An 18-foot rear-projection wall supported high-resolution digital presentation, allowing large sequences of photographs and accompanying films to share the compact exhibition space. Thirty-one exhibitions drew more than one million people before the institution closed in 2020, ending an eleven-year cultural program embedded directly within Century City's corporate architecture. The progression moves from a nationally significant public golf course through an institution confronting twentieth-century persecution and culminates with a former center dedicated entirely to photographic culture, extending Century City's architectural concentration into the recreational, educational and visual history of the surrounding Westside.

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