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."