Wonder Boy Makes Good

A few days after Wonder Boy Charles Luckman was rinsed out as president of Lever Bros, in 1950, he received a cardboard tube in the mail. It contained a drawing for a monastery that Chuck Luckman had designed as his last assignment before graduating magna cum laude from the University of Illinois' architectural school in 1931. With the plans came a note from Los Angeles Architect William L. Pereira, an old friend and college classmate: "Chuck, for 20 years I've had my eye on this guy ... I think he's mature enough to return to the fold. How about it?"

Cinema & Soap. Soap Salesman Luckman returned to the fold, started his business life over again at 40 by spending five months studying for his California architect's license. Then Luckman went into partnership with Bill Pereira, a brilliant, Jack-of-all-arts who had designed hospitals, movie studios and more than 75 Balaban & Katz theaters, produced movies (Johnny Angel, From This Day Forward), designed sets, won a 1942 Oscar for special effects in Reap the Wild Wind. Luckman's supersalesmanship and Pereira's flair for design soon proved a potent combination. Says one client: "Bill loads the gun and Chuck shoots it.'' Less than five months after they joined forces. Pereira's background in studio design and Luckman's soap-opera experience enabled them to bag the commission for Hollywood's $5,000,000 CBS television headquarters, the first building ever planned specifically for TV production.

Pereira and Luckman soon turned into one of the nimblest teams in U.S. architecture. In Washington, when Navy officials poked holes in their design for a naval-training center, they spent the night on the floor of their Statler Hotel room working up a new presentation, returned next morning with drawings that won the $2,200,000 contract. The partners refused to be type cast. In quick succession, Pereira and Luckman built department stores, shopping centers, banks, designed a suburban San Diego hospital so efficiently that it was operating in the black in six months. At Southern California's $3,500,000 Marineland, they designed two huge tanks that duplicate ocean life so realistically that visitors, peering through a series of portholes at different levels, have the uncanny impression of being under the sea. At Disneyland, they built a 450-room hotel as modern as Tomorrowland.

Campus Land. Their swift rise has also been due to their flair for "master planning," i.e., an overall plan for multibuilding projects in which they frequently coordinate the work of other architects.

One of their most successful masterplanning ventures was the University of California's $23 million Santa Barbara campus. Said Luckman: "Campuses are often built building by building, as the money comes in. We have made our plans very flexible. We started planning wings so that they could stand alone. If the money ran out, nobody need know."

Pereira and Luckman landed their first big overall master-planning job in 1951: a huge guided-missile test center at Florida's Patrick Air Force Base. After they had planned a $35 million jet base at Palmdale, Calif, for Lockheed, North American, Northrop and Convair, Northrop awarded the partners a contract to design its new $10 million engineering center. Pereira and Luckman's biggest master-planning job to date: overall supervision of U.S. Air Force and naval base construction in Spain (cost: $300 million).

"The Realities of Life." Pereira and Luckman generally charge clients either a straight fee or a percentage of cost, ranging from 4.5% (for an air base) to 8% (for a hospital). Despite the booming business. Pereira and Luckman take out much less than the $100,000-a-year Luckman got as president of Pepsodent. They plow back the bulk of the profits into the business. Though he is busier than ever, Luckman still finds time to serve on the boards of five Los Angeles civic groups. He wakes at 5 a.m. in the Bel Air mansion he bought from Hotelman Conrad Hilton (who recently commissioned Pereira and Luckman to design the Berlin Hilton hotel), usually has at least one hour's work behind him when he sets out for the firm's Sunset Boulevard offices. Outwardly, Chuck Luckman has changed little since he washed Lever Bros, out of his thinning sandy hair. "The drive is still in me," says he, "though perhaps I control the momentum a little better."

Stoking the momentum at P. & L. last week was $700 million worth of uncompleted work, ranging from IBM's new $4,500,000 West Coast headquarters in Los Angeles to a mammoth Union Oil center, designed around a diamond-shaped office building with a heliport and four floors of underground parking for 1,500 cars. In addition, the partners last week won a contract to master-plan a long-range, $5,000,000 remodeling program at Los Angeles' Occidental College, started work on a 100-room addition to the Disneyland hotel, and a $40 million Los Angeles slum-clearance project. The new business brought P. & L.'s five-year contract total to well over $1.1 billion. "I think," grinned Chuck Luckman, "we're adjusting our art to the realities of life."

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