Why you should experience Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, California.
Griffith Observatory is a commanding public astronomy center where Los Feliz's foothill character meets Art Deco architecture, working telescopes and sweeping views across the Los Angeles Basin.
Set on the southern slope of Mount Hollywood near Western Canyon Road and just above Fern Dell, the observatory occupies an elevated shelf within Griffith Park at 1,134 feet, with the city spreading southward beneath the Santa Monica Mountains. Architects John C. Austin and Frederick M. Ashley shaped the original cast-in-place concrete building through a symmetrical Beaux-Arts plan enriched by Moderne and Modified Greek elements, placing a central copper dome between two smaller telescope domes. Broad terraces extend the architecture into its hillside setting, providing unobstructed outlooks toward Downtown, the Pacific coast and the Hollywood Sign as the building maintains a low horizontal profile against the mountain. The central rotunda and flanking galleries organize movement beneath the domes, joining astronomical instruments, exhibition halls and exterior observation areas within a compact scientific complex. The result is a hilltop observatory whose domes, terraces, axial plan and extraordinary metropolitan outlook place astronomical observation and the geography of Los Angeles within the same architectural composition.
What you should know about Griffith Observatory.
Griffith Observatory is best known for turning Griffith J. Griffith's ambition for publicly accessible astronomy into one of the world's most heavily used public observatories. Griffith donated 3,015 acres of Rancho Los Felis to Los Angeles in 1896, then offered the city $100,000 for a public observatory in 1912 after encounters with astronomy and Mount Wilson sharpened his interest in giving ordinary Angelenos direct access to the sky. His 1919 will supplied funds and detailed requirements for the project after political delays prevented construction during his lifetime. George Ellery Hale, who had directed the development of major observatories at Yerkes, Mount Wilson and Palomar, joined the planning effort in 1930, and Caltech physicist Edward Kurth developed preliminary plans with telescope-maker Russell W. Porter as a consultant. Caltech and Mount Wilson engineers designed several foundational scientific installations, including a Foucault Pendulum, Roger Hayward's 38-foot lunar model and a three-mirror coelostat feeding separate solar telescopes. Trustees selected a 12-inch Zeiss refractor for public observing and replaced Griffith's planned motion-picture theater with a 75-foot planetarium after that technology emerged during the 1920s. William Simpson Construction Company began work in June 1933, and physicist Rudolph Langer assumed oversight after Kurth died in an automobile accident in 1934. The Long Beach earthquake of 1933 prompted thicker concrete walls and abandonment of a planned terra-cotta exterior as the architectural team strengthened the unfinished building. Griffith Observatory was dedicated on May 14, 1935 and transferred to the City of Los Angeles, opening publicly the following day with free admission written into Griffith's civic vision. More than eight million people have since looked through the Zeiss refractor, a figure the institution states exceeds use of any other telescope on Earth.
A comprehensive renewal undertaken between 2002 and 2006 gave the institution an equally consequential second architectural chapter after 67 years of continuous operation and 70 million admissions. Friends Of The Observatory, founded in 1978 by director E. C. Krupp with Debra and Harold Griffith, became the nonprofit partner in a campaign that advanced from a 1990 master plan to the appointment of Pfeiffer Partners and Levin & Associates Architects during the following decade. The $93 million undertaking combined $67.4 million in public funding with $25.6 million from private sources, allocating $66.5 million to construction-related work, $14.8 million to exhibition development and $8.5 million to planetarium equipment and show production. Pfeiffer Partners placed most of the 39,600-square-foot expansion beneath the front lawn and west terrace, increasing the interior from 27,300 to 66,900 square feet. C&G Partners designed the new exhibition program, Maltbie handled exhibit construction, Carl Zeiss Jena supplied a Universarium Mark IX star projector and Evans & Sutherland supplied digital projectors. The original planetarium interior was stripped of its 1964 Zeiss Mark IV projector, 600 seats and aging plaster dome before a perforated aluminum dome, new projection systems, sound equipment and seating remade the theater as the Samuel Oschin Planetarium. The underground expansion added the Gunther Depths of Space, Leonard Nimoy Event Horizon, Boeing Education Center and a 150-foot Cosmic Connection timeline, broadening the scientific program without substantially altering the familiar hilltop silhouette. The building reopened in November 2006 after the first comprehensive capital renewal in its history, extending Griffith's public-science mission through an architectural intervention largely concealed beneath the original grounds.
How to fold Griffith Observatory into your trip.
Griffith Observatory works as the anchor for a Los Angeles outing connecting outdoor performance, the cultural construction of the American West and an early center of California modern architecture.
Begin at Greek Theatre, the open-air amphitheater completed in Griffith Park in 1930 from designs by Norton & Wallis with Frederick Heath and George Gove. The canyon site supplied natural topography for a classical amphitheater composition, with the original stage architecture drawing from Greek temple forms and a first performance attracting a capacity crowd of 4,000 in June 1931. The U.S. military requisitioned the theater as troop housing during World War II, interrupting its early performance history before producer James A. Doolittle began a 23-year lease in 1952 and upgraded seating and backstage facilities. Later decades brought performers including Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Nicks to the 5,900-seat municipal venue. Continue to Autry Museum of the American West, founded by Jackie and Gene Autry with Joanne and Monte Hale and opened in Griffith Park in 1988 as the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum. Gene Autry had contemplated a museum for decades, and the founding group initially gathered objects from Melody Ranch before Jackie Autry and Joanne Hale expanded the concept and brought Walt Disney Imagineering into exhibition planning. Seven inaugural galleries examined opportunity, conquest, community, cowboys, discovery, romance and imagination, deliberately placing historical artifacts beside the popular mythology created through film and entertainment. The institution later absorbed the Southwest Museum of the American Indian, whose roots reach to Charles Lummis and Los Angeles's first museum, and its holdings now exceed 600,000 cultural objects, artworks and archival items. Conclude at Hollyhock House, commissioned by oil heiress and theater producer Aline Barnsdall from Frank Lloyd Wright after she acquired the 36-acre Olive Hill property in 1919. Wright conceived a larger arts complex around Barnsdall's residence, with Rudolph Schindler and Lloyd Wright overseeing completion during Wright's work on Tokyo's Imperial Hotel; the house became Wright's first Southern California residence and an important precursor to his later regional work. Stylized hollyhocks recur through ornamental art stone, furniture, textiles and art glass, tying Barnsdall's favorite flower to the architecture at multiple scales. Barnsdall transferred the property to Los Angeles in 1927 for public arts use, and the house subsequently became a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 1963, a National Historic Landmark in 2007 and part of UNESCO's 2019 inscription of eight major Frank Lloyd Wright works. The progression moves from a classical open-air performance venue through an institution examining the history and mythology of the American West and culminates in Barnsdall and Wright's formative California commission, connecting three distinct strands of Los Angeles cultural ambition across Griffith Park and Los Feliz.
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