ABSTRACT
Aerospace redefined Southern California's industrial landscape. In the half century of boom and bust bracketed by the beginning of the Second World War and the end of the Cold War, Douglas, Lockheed, North American Aviation, Thompson-Ramo-Wooldridge (TRW) and other defense giants dramatically shifted the center of gravity of the aerospace industry from east to west, making it Southern California's largest single employer and turning an industry built on manufacturing know-how into one increasingly dependent on scientific expertise. The architects of these new corporate factories, laboratories, think tanks, and test sites, and the residential communities surrounding them, evoked Cold War Los Angeles as expressively as Albert Kahn's architecture had done for Fordist Detroit, the visual embodiment of an emerging industrial regime. Kahn's automobile factories captured one crucial moment of modernity, the pinnacle of mass production in all of its promise and peril. 1 Southern California's aerospace modernism captured another, an architecture of Armageddon, the aesthetic for the emerging military-industrial complex.
