The Bradbury Building Hides a Cathedral Inside

304 South Broadway, downtown. The exterior is ordinary — brown sandstone, Romanesque arches, the kind of facade you walk past a hundred times. This is deliberate. Inside: a five-story atrium of ornamental iron, glazed brick, Belgian marble, and a skylight that turns the whole interior into a column of light. Your first step through the door is the contrast.

George Wyman designed it in 1893. He was a draftsman, not a licensed architect. According to his own account, he consulted a planchette board and received a message from his dead brother: "Take the Bradbury assignment. It will make you famous." He took it. It did. Two open-cage elevators — the oldest surviving commercial elevators in LA — rise through the center in wrought-iron enclosures with Art Nouveau lines. The corridors on each floor are open to the atrium, lined with glazed yellow brick that holds the skylight.

You know this building from Blade Runner. Ridley Scott chose it because it looks like the future and the past simultaneously. Stand on the ground floor and look straight up through the elevator shaft: iron framework against glass, shadow and light in a slow kaleidoscope as clouds move. On a clear afternoon the atrium fills with a golden haze and the building seems to breathe light. Lobby open weekdays during business hours. Free. Five minutes. The most beautiful five minutes of your day.