Mid-Century Modern Overlooked: From LA to San Fran, Hiding in Plain Sight

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About

Apollo Marconi designs and fabricates bespoke objects in a multitude of fine materials for B2C and B2B end users. Solutions range from address numbers and architectural lettering, to both corporate and sporting awards and recognition pieces. Long time clients in the latter category include Subaru of America, the Henry Ford Museum and the Canadian Football League.

Company co-founder Mark Block says “As a design/build business I had 10 years of custom kitchens behind me before transitioning to furniture and retail fixtures. Following a 1993 commission to design and install a large selection of one-off freestanding stainless, aluminum glass fixtures at a Winnipeg retailer’s brand new gift shop in West Vancouver, the client asked me if I had ever considered tackling the residential market’s nearly complete lack of modern mailboxes. My response later that year was the Nvelope stainless steel mailbox – a take on what would happen if you crossed an invitation envelope with the exterior aesthetic of an airstream trailer. Within the next two years, my mailbox customers – both retail and consumer end users – began inquiring whether we had any sans serif modernist stainless address numbers to complete the look. By 1999 we added those to our mailbox website, and within a year found we had to spin off a second site specifically devoted to custom address numbers.

In 2001, we were contacted by House Industries, a brashly confident young font foundry with a good reputation in the graphic design and print art direction community. They were preparing to launch a new font by type designer Christian Schwartz. It was called Neutraface, and House wanted us to supply them with stainless lettering and numbers to photograph for their upcoming colour print catalog. 100,000 catalog mailouts later I was busy adding Neutraface numbers to our website and seeing new business from many of the architects, graphic designers and art directors who had received the Neutraface mailout from House Industries – which had fortuitously also included our contact information.

By 2004 we were collaborating with the bricks and clicks retailer Design Within Reach [DWR] – under CEO Tara Poseley – to supply them with Neutra House Numbers in 4 inch high stainless steel. After a robust launch plus a fruitful four years of stellar sales, things changed. Just before the real estate bubble crashed the markets in 2008, Dion Neutra, the son of celebrated architect Richard Neutra – to whom we’d been paying a royalty of 8% of gross (and another 8% to House Industries) – took over supplying address numbers to DWR, which ended our era as a vendor to DWR’s 70 stores and Kentucky distribution warehouse. This coincided with the period when Ray Brunner was CEO at DWR, an era about which Jeff Chu wrote an award winning piece called The Rise and Fall of Design Within Reach.

The faces/fonts we’re featuring at our new Shopify site come from LA’s finest architectural era, between the 30s and 70s. The benefits of Keynesian economics, fueled initially by FDR’s New Deal, had propelled the building of countless social infrastructure projects. In the 50s and 60s mortgage interest rates hovered around 5% (with no meddling from “the Fed”, who didn’t exist yet) and income tax rates on those earning over $70K ($750K in today’s money) were between 80-90 percent. The same period saw the Case Study House Program propel innovations in modernist residential architecture, although, as Julius Shulman pointed out in 2001, the Program did not entirely fulfill at least one of its goals – to address the need for new methods of building low cost housing.

Apollo Marconi has benefitted over the past 25 years doing business with clients, customers and retailers in LA County – I feel I owe them something. We will soon be implementing an LA Fires percentage into the sale of each of the SoCal faces. Los Angeles history is integral to our most exciting offering in 2025 – address numbers and letters that faithfully reproduce the architectural lettering and numbers so familiar to Angelenos because they see them on their daily commutes, whether on their
mid-century fire stations, schools, post offices, public libraries, swimming pools or police stations.

The majority of the designs we’re reproducing originated at the A J Bayer Co, who had a foundry and metalwork shop at the corner of Santa Fe and Slauson from 1902 to the late 1980s, plus a smaller
operation up north in Oakland and later Alameda. Their architectural lettering series, consisting of about 15 faces, were part of their more affordable “a la carte” offerings, and were popular for decades with everyone from the Los Angeles Fire Department to the modernist architects that Arts & Architecture magazine solicited to showcase their residential work through the Case Study House Program.”