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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."