Why you should experience Westfield Century City in Los Angeles, California.
Westfield Century City is an expansive open-air retail destination where Century City's modernist character meets landscaped courtyards, grand public art and a garden-oriented commercial environment shaped for Southern California's climate.
Set along Santa Monica Boulevard near Avenue of the Stars and just steps from Century Park West, the center occupies a major northern gateway to Century City where retail terraces mediate between surrounding office towers and the lower residential districts beyond the commercial core. Broad pedestrian passages unfold through multiple elevations of storefronts, planting and shaded gathering areas, with open sky remaining visible across much of the property. Moving through the center carries the encounter between intimate garden courts and larger commercial corridors, repeatedly opening long views through bridges, terraces and changes in elevation. Reflecting pools, fountains, mature trees, tilework and integrated sculpture add a second physical dimension, breaking the immense property into smaller outdoor environments with distinct proportions and landscape compositions. The result is a retail complex whose scale becomes legible through gardens and pedestrian spaces, extending Century City's architectural ambition into an unusually elaborate open-air commercial environment.
What you should know about Westfield Century City.
Westfield Century City is best known for evolving from Century Square, the 15-acre open-air shopping center completed in 1964 as one of the earliest major components of Century City. Welton Becket and Associates designed the center within the larger master plan Becket developed after Alcoa and William Zeckendorf formed Century City Inc. to transform former 20th Century Fox backlot property into a new commercial and residential district. The original complex incorporated 30 acres of underground parking accommodating 2,700 automobiles, aligning its retail architecture with a master plan conceived around the automobile and the newly constructed boulevards of Century City. The Broadway served as the principal department store when the center opened, giving the emerging district a major retail anchor only a year after completion of its first office building. Expansion onto former surface parking in 1976 added Bullock's and additional shops, substantially enlarging the original configuration. Rosenberg Real Estate Equity Funds acquired the property in 1983 and undertook a $36 million redevelopment completed in 1988, doubling the tenant count through reconfigured space and adding the Marketplace as an indoor-outdoor food hall. Federated Department Stores' 1996 acquisition of Broadway Stores subsequently converted The Broadway into Bloomingdale's and Bullock's into Macy's, replacing the center's founding department-store identities with two new anchors. Westfield Group acquired a 50 percent interest in 2002 and initiated a $160 million renovation two years later that introduced an alfresco Dining Terrace, a 15-screen AMC cinema, additional retail construction and a remodeled Bloomingdale's. Those successive interventions carried a 1960s shopping center through four decades of retail change before Westfield embarked on the reconstruction that produced its present scale.
The property's largest reinvention began in 2015 as a $1 billion redevelopment that expanded gross leasable area by 400,000 square feet to 1.3 million square feet and increased the projected retailer count to 260. Westfield demolished the 1963 Gateway West office building and other existing construction to enlarge the center, abandoning an earlier proposal for a residential tower as the project shifted toward a substantially expanded retail program. The reconstructed center introduced a three-level Nordstrom flagship for Los Angeles, a rebuilt two-level Macy's, a remodeled three-level Bloomingdale's and the first West Coast location of Eataly. Kelly Wearstler developed a design program rooted in Southern California outdoor living, using custom teak furniture, latticed screens, travertine planters, Moroccan-influenced tile and more than 50 custom tile patterns across landscaped courts. Olive trees, aloe, reflecting pools, fountains, vine-covered bridges and suspended daybeds divided the immense property into garden-like precincts, with mature olive trees preserved from the demolished Gateway West site incorporated into the Atrium. Ceramic artist Stan Bitters contributed California DNA, and Jun Kaneko's large-scale dango sculptures extended the artistic program through permanent works embedded within the landscape. The Atrium itself was configured for audiences of 1,000, giving the redevelopment a dedicated setting for concerts and staged programming alongside its commercial functions. Nordstrom opened with a major phase of the reconstruction on October 3, 2017, followed by Eataly on November 3, completing a redevelopment that recast the half-century-old center as one of the largest retail properties on Los Angeles' Westside.
How to fold Westfield Century City into your trip.
Westfield Century City works as the anchor for an architectural walk tracing Century City's emergence from an experimental postwar business district into a setting for internationally significant modernism and permanent public art.
Begin at The Freedom Sculpture, the grand work by engineer, designer and artist Cecil Balmond installed in the Santa Monica Boulevard median at Century Park East and unveiled on July 4, 2017. The Farhang Foundation organized the commission to commemorate the ideals associated with the ancient Cyrus Cylinder, selecting Balmond's proposal from more than 300 submissions and raising $2.2 million through community support. Balmond formed the work from two gold-and-silver cylinders resting on large rings, covering their surfaces with text and imagery derived from the cultural history surrounding the Cyrus Cylinder. Its elongated composition was developed to change visually as traffic passes along the boulevard, turning a major transportation corridor at Century City's northern edge into the setting for a permanent work connecting Iranian heritage with Los Angeles' large Iranian-American community. Continue to Fairmont Century Plaza, the crescent-shaped hotel Minoru Yamasaki designed as the centerpiece of the new Century City and opened on June 1, 1966 with 750 rooms. Yamasaki used repetitive balconies across the sweeping curved façade and gold-anodized aluminum supplied by Alcoa, giving the building a formal architectural presence suited to a district promoted as a self-contained metropolitan center. Its social history quickly matched its architectural importance: Lyndon B. Johnson's 1967 appearance drew thousands of antiwar demonstrators and a major confrontation with police, and Richard Nixon hosted a 1969 dinner honoring the Apollo 11 astronauts after their return from the Moon. A proposed demolition announced decades later generated a major preservation campaign, leading to a revised redevelopment that retained and restored Yamasaki's building as the centerpiece of a multibillion-dollar project. Conclude at Century Park, where the twin Century Plaza Towers preserve another major Yamasaki commission within a 14-acre office campus containing four acres of landscaped open space. Completed in 1975, the 44-story towers rise from unusual triangular footprints and use emphatic vertical aluminum cladding associated with Yamasaki's Corporate International architecture, extending ideas he explored at New York's World Trade Center into a dramatically different geometric form. An underground passage originally connected the towers across Avenue of the Stars with the hotel complex, integrating the buildings into the pedestrian circulation planned for the district. The surrounding campus later incorporated 2000 Avenue of the Stars, built on the former ABC Entertainment Center site, placing Yamasaki's paired towers inside a setting that charts another generation of Century City development. The progression moves from Cecil Balmond's twenty-first-century civic sculpture through Yamasaki's preserved hotel centerpiece and culminates with his paired office towers, revealing how public art, architectural preservation and corporate modernism shaped Century City's built character across successive generations.
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