Los Angeles feels forever suspended in its own mythology. The past shimmers like a mirage just behind the glass of a storefront or the curve of a marquee. In Art Deco Los Angeles, photographer Robert Landau and architectural historian Alan Hess capture that mirage with reverence, precision, and panache. This newly released volume, published by Angel City Press in collaboration with the Los Angeles Public Library, arrives in poetic sync to honor the centennial of the 1925 Paris exhibition that first gave name to the Deco phenomenon.

Landau’s lens acts as both time machine and love letter, sweeping us through a golden age of geometry and gloss. From the celestial acoustics of the Hollywood Bowl to the jade-and-gold majesty of the Eastern Columbia building and the haunting ruins of the Pan-Pacific Auditorium, each image pulses with the theatrical memory that defines the city itself. Even the familiar becomes spellbound: the sleek curve of the Saban Building, now home to the Academy Museum, or Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House, re-photographed in 2024 and still resonating with its Mayan-Modern mystique.

Los Angeles has long been dismissed as a city built on illusion. But Art Deco Los Angeles insists on the opposite—that this is a city of design with staying power, where steel and stucco become vessels of vision. Hess’s accompanying essay offers context without dulling the dazzle, mapping Deco’s lineage as one of boldness, ornamentation, and aesthetic rebellion. His words give weight to Landau’s visual seduction, rendering the book not just beautiful, but urgent, tracing the cultural lineage of Deco beyond its glittering surface into something more radical and resilient.

This isn’t just a coffee-table elegy to a bygone style. It’s a reframing. A reminder that beneath the city’s sprawl and sparkle lies a blueprint of ambition—a stylistic manifesto etched in neon, lined in chrome, and alive with intent. With Landau’s camera as guide and Hess’s words as compass, Art Deco Los Angeles invites us to reencounter the city not as it was, but as it’s always been: iconic by design.