Bradbury Building

The Bradbury Building is the most photographed interior in Los Angeles — a five-storey office building from 1893 whose exterior is unremarkable brown brick but whose interior is an atrium of ornate wrought-iron staircases, open cage elevators, and a glass ceiling that floods the space with natural light. The building appeared most famously in 'Blade Runner' (1982), where its iron railings and diffused light provided the backdrop for the film's climactic confrontation, and it has since appeared in hundreds of films, TV shows, and music videos.

The building was designed by George Wyman, a young draftsman with no prior building experience, who reportedly accepted the commission after receiving encouragement from his dead brother via a Ouija board — a origin story that, true or not, captures the era's eccentric confidence. The interior, with its French-made wrought iron, Italian marble stairs, Mexican tile, and Belgian iron railings, was inspired by Edward Bellamy's utopian novel 'Looking Backward' (1888), which described a future commercial building with a light-filled atrium. Wyman built the novel's vision, and it has been in continuous use for over 130 years.

The lobby is open to the public during business hours (the upper floors are private offices and are not accessible), and the experience of stepping through the plain exterior door into the luminous, iron-laced atrium is one of LA's great architectural reveals. The building is a National Historic Landmark and sits on Broadway in the Historic Core, surrounded by the restored movie palaces and the increasingly vibrant downtown scene.