by Myrna Oliver

Martin Stern Jr., the architect who in the mid-20th century designed a significant chunk of Las Vegas' skyline and such beloved Googie-style structures as Los Angeles' Ships coffee shops, has died. He was 84.

Stern died Saturday in Los Angeles, a spokesman for Mt. Sinai Mortuary confirmed Monday.

The architect, who moved to Los Angeles in the 1930s to work as a motion picture studio sketch artist, closed his architectural practice in 1996 and donated his more than 600 sets of drawings and plans for about 100 buildings to the University of Nevada at Las Vegas Library. But for nearly 50 years, Stern had churned out a variety of designs, ranging from tract houses to bowling alleys, office buildings, restaurants and casino resort hotels in Las Vegas, Reno, Lake Tahoe and Atlantic City.

"Much of the history of Las Vegas [is] in the drawings of Martin Stern Jr.," Peter Michel, UNLV director of special collections, wrote after receiving Stern's gift to the university.

In Los Angeles, Stern was probably best known for the three Ships coffee shops opened in 1956 and 1957 by the late Emmett Shipman, who got the nickname "Ships" when he served in the Navy.

The Ships at Wilshire Boulevard and Glendon Avenue in Westwood served hearty comfort food such as chicken pot pie and half-pound hamburgers 24 hours a day for 27 years. It was razed in 1984, despite protests by preservationists, and replaced by a 22-story office building.

Two other Ships, at 1016 La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, and at 10705 Washington Blvd., Culver City, also served the familiar fare and, as in Westwood, featured a toaster at each table. They closed in 1995. The Culver City Ships, an example of architecture once considered impossibly kitschy but now revered, is a Starbucks coffeehouse.

Leon Whiteson, who wrote about architecture for The Times, noted in a 1988 article that the Westwood Ships, with its distinctive orange color scheme and boomerang trusses that resembled a rocket ship ready to blast off, "was recognized by architectural historians and local residents as a masterpiece of the flamboyant Googie-style design."

Whiteson in a 1990 article explained the style as a "wonderfully weird" blend of Frank Lloyd Wright, Bauhaus Modernism and Las Vegas neon jazzed up by Space Age images.

"Coffee shop designers were clearly gifted," he wrote, listing Stern "among others [who] created a popular architecture that was purely American in its confidence in a techno future unencumbered by history or elite (read European) notions of taste."

When Stern made his original foray into Las Vegas in 1953, that city, like Los Angeles, shaped architecture according to the vast spaces available. The result in the gambling mecca was low-rise, wide-flung wings of rooms surrounding great outdoor swimming pools. Stern's first project was a low-rise room addition for the Sahara Hotel.

But that would soon change, and Stern was largely responsible. He designed the Sahara's first skyscraper (14 stories) in 1959, its convention facility in 1967, a 342-room high-rise addition in 1977 and another 625-room high-rise addition in 1979.

In the mid-1960s, Stern also created a new expansion tower for the Sands Hotel, moving some of its original two-story structures to provide the space. That high-rise project, according to Michel, signaled an end to the low-slung and rambling early hotels for a higher skyline along the Las Vegas Strip.

In the same period, Stern also lifted downtown Las Vegas skyward with a 26-story building for the Mint Hotel, and signaled a major change in the city's architecture by designing the megalithic triform International Hotel (later the Las Vegas Hilton) near the Convention Center.

Stern followed that with the MGM Grand Hotel in 1971 (later Bally's), the last of his Strip monuments. He continued, however, to redesign and expand the Sahara, the Riviera and the El Rancho hotels well into the 1980s.

In Reno and Tahoe, he designed Harrah's and the MGM Grand among others, and for Atlantic City the Showboat and Playboy properties.

Michel wrote that one of Stern's most fascinating projects was never built: the proposed Las Vegas resort Xanadu, planned by Donald Trump for the site where the Excalibur was later constructed. Trump's financing fell through, and Stern's innovative mastaba-shaped complex with a vast atrium and step-back rooms (presaging the later Luxor Hotel) was confined to his architectural drawings now housed at UNLV.

Stern is survived by his wife, Chantal; three sons and one daughter; a sister; and four grandchildren.

This article originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times, August 1, 2001.
Copyright, 2001, Los Angeles Times. Reprinted by Permission.

Ships Coffee Shop

Stern in his later years.

MARTIN STERN, the architect who has died aged 84, designed futuristic coffee shops in Los Angeles before transforming the architectural landscape of Las Vegas, Nevada, with high-rise hotels.

Working at Beverly Hills, California, during the 1950s, Stern created some of the finest examples of the kitsch architectural style known as "googie", that took its inspiration from space age imagery and motor car design. Notable among these were the three Ships drive-in coffee shops that opened in 1956 and 1957 in the Los Angeles area, each featuring a toaster on every table.

The Ships Coffee Shop in Westwood, with its distinctive orange interior and boomerang trusses, looked like a rocket about to be launched. But though it won widespread admiration, and despite campaigns to preserve it, it was demolished in 1984 to make way for an office block.

In the late-1960s, the entrepreneur Kirk Kerkorian approached Stern and announced that he wanted to build a hotel in Las Vegas. When Stern asked what kind of hotel the developer had in mind, Kerkorian's reply was "a big one".

The result, completed in 1969, was the International, whose tri-form 30-floor tower contained 1,519 rooms and became the most imitated building on the Las Vegas strip: it provided the model for the Bellagio, Treasure Island, Mirage and Mandalay Bay, among other hotels.

The interior of the International was decked out in white marble, with chandeliers imported from Czechoslovakia. Cary Grant and Natalie Wood attended the opening party, where they were entertained by Barbara Streisand and Elvis Presley.

In 1970 Kerkorian sold the International and the Flamingo, which he also owned, to the Hilton Corporation, to raise funds for an even more flamboyant hotel. Once again he employed Stern, who was by then adept at integrating a plethora of functions into a single building - which he would think of as a miniature city - while taking economic factors into consideration.

Like the International before it, the MGM Grand (now Bally's Las Vegas) was billed as "the world's largest resort hotel"; at its opening in 1973 it boasted 2,100 rooms, 25 bars - employing 70 bartenders and 150 cocktail waitresses - restaurants, a shopping mall, a spa, showrooms, theatres and casinos, one of which was flanked by 44 marble statues.

To accommodate the anticipated fleets of limousines, Stern built an enormous eight-lane porte cochere, with balustrades and railings scaled to make it feel even larger, and a statue made of 800 tons of marble imported from Italy.

Martin Stern Jr was born in New York on April 9 1917, the son of a salesman. After school, he moved to the West coast of America to study Architecture at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. After graduating, he worked for a time as a sketch artist for a Hollywood film studio.

As an officer in the American army from 1943, Stern participated in the Allied invasion of France, and in 1944 worked on the construction of shelters for combat troops in Belgium, locating lumber and reopening seven sawmills. The following year he served as a military governor for the Stadtkreis and Landkreis districts of Germany.

Back in California after the war, Stern continued his work for the army, making regular trips to San Francisco to design army camps throughout America. At the same time, he set up his own practice at Beverly Hills, designing flats, houses, restaurants, bowling alleys, and office buildings, as well as the Ships coffee shops.

In 1953, Stern was commissioned to design his first project in Las Vegas - a low-rise extension for the Sahara Hotel. At that time, accommodation for visitors was mostly limited to sprawling two-storey motel wings, arranged around pools and attached to casinos. With bright neon signs as their only distinctive feature, the casinos sat between golf courses and undeveloped tracts, and space was not in short supply.

But with rising land prices and the growing popularity of Las Vegas as a conference centre during the late 1950s and early 1960s, Stern was soon asked to design corporate high-rise resorts that were to transform the city.

In 1959, the Sahara Hotel asked him to build a 14-storey high-rise extension, and in 1964, he built the cylindrical Sands Hotel, where the Venetian now stands. Howard Hughes bought the property in 1967 and when Stern was told his building was due to be demolished, his reply was: "Oh well, it wasn't much of a tower."

There followed further commissions from the Sahara - a new conference centre (1967), a 342-room addition (1977) and 625-room addition (1979) - as well as a glass-encased restaurant for the Flamingo Hotel in 1967. The following year he designed a 26-storey tower for the Mint Hotel in downtown Las Vegas.

However, of some 300 projects that Stern designed in the course of his career, around 200 were never built. Outstanding among these is his spectacular design for Xanadu hotel, a hollow step-pyramid with a towering atrium and an Asiatic theme. Planned by Donald Trump on the site of the present-day Excalibur Hotel, it was never built after an argument with the municipal authorities, who required that the developers build a new sewer line.

Stern was also prolific outside Las Vegas, designing resorts in Lake Tahoe, Reno, Hawaii and Atlantic City; in the latter he was responsible for the Showboat Hotel and Casino. The Marriott hotel in Scottsdale, Arizona (1959) included three swimming pools, an executive golf course, a ballroom and enormous dining rooms, where banquets were held with names like "Cowboy Steakfry", "Mexican Fiesta" and "Hawaiian Luau".

Stern was devastated when, in 1980, a fire broke out at the MGM Grand, killing 85 people. The disaster was a catalyst for the enactment of the Hotel and Motel Fire Safety Act of 1990. Cary Grant was the first to book a suite when the MGM Grand reopened eight months later.

Stern had two sons from his first marriage. He married secondly, in 1967, Chantal Maspey. They had a son and a daughter.

This article originally appeared in the London Daily Telegraph, September 8, 2001.

For more information on Martin Stern, Jr., see: http://library.nevada.edu/speccol/martinstern.html