Superior Oil Company Building

About this property

The Delphi Hotel is a 12-story hotel located at 550 S Flower St in Downtown Los Angeles in the marble-clad high-rise Superior Oil Company Building formerly the headquarters of the now defunct company, converted to The Standard Downtown LA hotel in 2002, then closed in 2020 and reopened in 2023 under its current name. The marble-clad Superior Oil Company Building was constructed from 1955–1956 as an office building by the Keck family to serve as the headquarters for the Superior Oil Company. Designed by Claud Beelman in the Late Moderne style, the 12-story structure was built by The William Simpson Construction Company. The tower's design has been described as showing "how the oft-overlooked Beelman advanced the type and style of mid-century office buildings." It was given distinctive marble, granite, and stainless-steel surfaces. The building's design featured motifs particular to Superior Oil, including stylized "S" door pulls for the entrances and a bas-relief-style metal sculpture of an oilfield and refinery landscape above the Flower Street entrance interior. According to the Los Angeles Times, it became "one of the area's most significant examples of the postwar modernism style popular in corporate architecture during the 1950s." The LA Conservancy calls the building "one of the finest examples of the Corporate Moderne style in Los Angeles and stands out as one of the strongest designs of architect Claud Beelman’s later career." The architecture represents a "simplified, abstracted redefinition" of Beelman's earlier explorations in the Late Moderne styles, also incorporating Modernist principles to "create a refined new corporate idiom." The building uses steel framing and a "pier and spandrel system" similar to those pioneered by Louis Sullivan. In a twist, however, the piers are clad in white marble and the recessed spandrels are ribbed stainless steel between window spaces, emphasizing the vertical nature of the architecture. In 1963, the building became the southern California headquarters of the Bank of California, and for a time the building was called the Bank of California Building. The building was vacated in 1992, after the Bank of California was merged into Union Bank of California. By 2000, local preservation groups were expressing worries that the vacant structure would be gutted and used as a telecommunications switching station, like other office buildings in the area. In January 2000, it was reported that the Union Bank of California had sold the building to William Gustafson and Mark Neumann's Columbia Development, "a Manhattan Beach-based hotel investment and development firm," for an undisclosed sum. With backing from local preservation groups, it was to be the "central city's first major new hotel in nearly a decade."

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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