Why Kia Forum matters.
Kia Forum is a circular arena where Inglewood's entertainment heritage meets Roman-inspired architecture, an uninterrupted seating bowl and a concert program built around one of Southern California's most recognizable performance rooms.
Set along West Manchester Boulevard near South Prairie Avenue and just north of Hollywood Park Casino, the arena occupies a broad freestanding site within Inglewood's concentration of major sports and entertainment venues. Charles Luckman Associates shaped the building as a low cylindrical volume encircled by a modernized colonnade, drawing directly from the spatial clarity and exterior order of ancient Roman arenas. The uninterrupted bowl places the audience around a single central floor without the stacked suite structures that became prevalent in later American arenas, preserving unusually direct visual relationships between seating and performance area. Exterior restoration returned the circular facade to its original deep “Forum Red,” reinforcing the horizontal colonnade and solid upper drum that distinguish the building from the immense contemporary venues now surrounding it. The result is an arena whose circular mass, repetitive columns, concentrated seating geometry and restored exterior preserve the architectural character of a 1960s performance building amid Inglewood's twenty-first-century entertainment district.
What defines Kia Forum.
Kia Forum is best known for the extraordinary sports and music history that began after Los Angeles Lakers owner Jack Kent Cooke secured an NHL expansion franchise and pursued a purpose-built Inglewood arena for both the Lakers and his new Los Angeles Kings. Architect Charles Luckman worked with Cooke on the project, and the building opened on December 30, 1967 with a Kings game against the Philadelphia Flyers. The Lakers followed one day later, beginning an era in which the arena became inseparable from some of professional basketball's most consequential teams. Jerry Buss purchased the Lakers, Kings and Forum from Cooke in 1979, and the Lakers subsequently won six NBA championships during their remaining years in Inglewood, including five titles during the 1980s under coach Pat Riley with Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar central to the roster. The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics brought men's and women's basketball and the men's handball finals into the building, adding an international sporting chapter to its professional tenancy. Music had already become equally consequential after Aretha Franklin became its first musical performer in January 1968; Led Zeppelin, Queen, Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, Eagles, Neil Diamond, Van Halen and Genesis belonged to the extensive succession of major touring acts that followed. Great Western Bank acquired naming rights in 1988, creating the Great Western Forum name that remained attached to the arena into the following decade. The Lakers and Kings departed for Staples Center in 1999, ending 32 years in which the building functioned as their shared home. Faithful Central Bible Church purchased the property in 2000, using it for religious services and entertainment events during a period when the aging arena faced an uncertain long-term future.
Madison Square Garden Company acquired the property in June 2012 and launched a $100 million reinvestment intended to recast the former sports arena around live music. Brisbin Brook Beynon Architects directed the architectural work, Clark Construction served as general contractor and the seven-month construction campaign encompassed the 307,000-square-foot building. Crews repaired the existing cable roof truss system and added 230 tons of steel reinforcement to support contemporary lighting and rigging loads, substantially increasing the building's production capacity. The seating bowl was modernized into configurations ranging from 7,000 to 17,500 seats, locker rooms were converted into artist dressing rooms and the floor was adapted into a large general-admission area as music became the building's principal function. Eagles inaugurated the renewed venue in January 2014 with six sold-out concerts, beginning a new period that later brought performers including Lady Gaga, Drake, MANÁ, Harry Styles, Bad Bunny and Billie Eilish to the arena. Preservation work received a Los Angeles Conservancy Preservation Award, a Los Angeles Business Council Architectural Award for Preservation and a National Trust for Historic Preservation Preservation Honor Award in 2014. Pollstar subsequently named the Forum its Arena of the Decade for the 2010s, marking the commercial success of its conversion into a music-centered venue. Kia America assumed naming rights on April 4, 2022 in the automaker's first United States naming-rights agreement, creating the Kia Forum name now carried by the building.
How Kia Forum fits.
Kia Forum works as the anchor for an Inglewood outing connecting the city's nineteenth-century origins, Gustavo Dudamel's youth-music initiative and a new generation of large-scale Southern California architecture.
Begin at Centinela Adobe Complex, centered on the adobe ranch house Ignacio Machado built in 1834 on Rancho Aguaje de la Centinela, decades before Inglewood emerged as a town. Scottish landowner Sir Robert Burnett later acquired the surrounding ranchos and transferred them to Canadian Daniel Freeman, whose agricultural enterprise shipped millions of bushels of barley from Playa Del Rey. Freeman's 1887 Land Office survives within the complex alongside the adobe and the Centinela Valley Heritage and Research Center, linking the surviving ranch structure with the subdivision era that produced Inglewood in 1888. The complex entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1974, preserving the earliest standing architectural chapter in the area's development. Continue to Beckmen YOLA Center, the first permanent home created for Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, the free music-education initiative launched by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel in 2007 and inspired by Venezuela's El Sistema. Frank Gehry volunteered his architectural services in 2018 and converted a 1960s former Security Pacific Bank branch into a 25,000-square-foot center without discarding its original footprint and facade. Gehry lowered the floor and raised the roof to create the acoustic volume required for orchestral performance, producing a 260-seat hall with a 45-foot vertical clearance, natural light and retractable divisions supporting rehearsals and teaching. The center opened in 2021 as a permanent architectural home for a program that had previously operated through partner sites across Los Angeles. Conclude at SoFi Stadium, the HKS-designed centerpiece of Hollywood Park developed under Los Angeles Rams owner E. Stanley Kroenke and completed as a 3.1-million-square-foot home for the Rams and Chargers. Proximity to Los Angeles International Airport placed the project beneath strict Federal Aviation Administration height limits, leading HKS to sink the seating bowl 100 feet below grade and turn a major constraint into a defining section of the building. A vast independent roof spans the stadium, American Airlines Plaza and YouTube Theater, with more than 35,000 individually configured anodized aluminum panels forming its porous exterior surface. HKS created a custom computational system for that geometry, and Inglewood accepted the resulting digital Model of Record for permitting, the first such architectural approval in the United States. The stadium received the 2021 Prix Versailles World Prize for Architecture and Design in the Sports category and the 2022 World Architecture Festival award for Completed Buildings: Sports. The progression moves from Machado's surviving ranch house through Gehry's conversion of a former bank into an orchestral teaching center and culminates in HKS's immense below-grade stadium, tracing three distinct architectural eras in Inglewood across nearly two centuries.
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