The Brooklyn Rail

What is the space women occupy in the history of architecture? It is ill-defined, full of unknown unknowns. We have no idea how many hard-working, talented women contributed to our constructed worlds and imaginations. Helen Liu Fong, an architect who practiced from 1949 to the late 1970s, is finally receiving some of her due, nearly two decades after her passing in 2005. Why is she relevant now? What can we learn from her today?

Fong is most well-known for her interior designs of diners and coffee shops in Los Angeles, but she was also involved in building and landscape. Her design for Pann’s Coffee Shop still stands today. The Womxn in Design and Architecture (WDA) Conference held at Princeton School of Architecture (February 27–28, 2025) honored her life and work. She is known also for her contributions to Googie, a loud design style of commercial spaces geared toward the middle class in 1950s Los Angeles. The term was coined pejoratively by architecture critic Douglas Haskell and took its name after a coffee shop designed by architect John Lautner. Googie architecture featured large signage and dynamic roofscapes, intended to literally stop traffic and entice a car-dependent population to swing by. These coffee shops and diners were a sort of third space, offering affordable leisure to the growing middle class of the postwar generation.

As we expand the canon to include once marginalized figures, the historiographies largely echo the same sentiment. Historian and curator Gary Riichirō Fox observed how the terms used to describe these marginalized figures draw from notions of settler colonialism. Racialized and/or gendered architects are often described as pioneers and trailblazers. At the concluding talk of the conference, Professor Sylvia Lavin noted that this year marked the ninth annual WDA conference, and as far as she can remember, each year’s conference has celebrated a woman who never married. The single woman might offer a more palatable substitute for the male hero figure. Wives and mothers are compromised by their responsibilities to others. Our cultural obsession with singular authors fuels our ignorance.

A charming anecdote persists in the media’s memory of Helen Liu Fong. She was known for her high-contrast color palette of reds, oranges, whites, and browns. During the construction of Pann’s, she commented that the white tiles behind the counter were too bland and painted them with her own red nail polish. This story was first shared by Eldon Davis in a 1993 LA Times article and was then circulated in almost every news article discussing Pann’s afterwards. Fox noted that Fong’s own description of the design omitted this anecdote. She focused on the visual and spatial achievements of the design. In her first featured profile in Rafu Shimpo, a bilingual Japanese-American community newspaper based in Little Tokyo, she is quoted saying, “The building’s non-static lines interpret and reflect the advancing social structure that has energy inside it.” Her tone is serious and earnest, emphasizing principles that guided design decisions. Fox suggested that the persistence of the nail polish anecdote was not of Fong’s own storytelling but a consequence of media bias that confined Fong to her identity as an Asian-American woman and limited her reach to surface effects. What is the relevance of authorial biography in creative works? Although tempting to look for direct visual cues of identity in the built work, Fong’s work reminds us that the relationship between individual agency and architecture is complex, entangling multiple contributors and cultural expectations.

Professor Jia Yi Gu presented transliteration—the mistranslations of names as immigrants assimilate. Helen Liu Fong was born in 1927—the Year of the Rabbit—as Hayland Fong. Records show that her brother was named Hayward. Gu suggested that the shared first syllables of their names correspond to the Chinese tradition of naming siblings with the same first character. In 1936, when Fong was nine years old and just over fifty years after the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act, her father submitted an affidavit changing her legal name to Helen, a much more conventional American female name. Fong grew up in Los Angeles’s Chinatown. Her family ran a laundry business, which would have been a site of order and chaos. During the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Asian men often performed feminized labor, such as laundry and cooking, because of their non-citizen status, the closed labor market, and the shortage of women in the American West. Fong’s decision to pursue the male-dominated field of architecture stands out in this context.

She initially studied at UCLA, claiming she was too poor to attend USC and not mature enough for UC Berkeley. Midway through her undergraduate education, she transferred to UC Berkeley, graduating with her bachelor’s degree in city planning in 1949. Architect Annie Chu noted that the university’s city planning department was officially established in 1948. During Fong’s time there, the program was still developing and likely influenced by the community-oriented social sciences entering the discipline. Fong had family connections with Chinese-American architect Eugene Choy, and her first job after school was working as his secretary and junior draftsman. One of Choy’s most celebrated works is Cathay Bank, located in Los Angeles Chinatown, which offered financial services to Chinese Americans, a group that was turned away from mainstream financial institutions. The facade and massing express monumentality while also featuring an ornamental roofline that nods toward Chinese origins. Professor Erica Allen-Kim described the Chinatown strip malls of Los Angeles as “landscapes of convenience” that survived through visible architectural theming with signage and ornamentation. The post-1965 immigrant neighborhoods were fraught sites of cultural negotiation as immigrants sought to create homes in America.

The commercial mid-brow is a design genre that has been avoided by the architectural canon. One of Fong’s well-known projects is the Holiday Bowl, a diner and bowling alley operated by a post-internment Japanese American community that attracted a diverse clientele of African American, Asian American, Jewish, Latinx, and Anglo American visitors. In one of Fong’s proposals for a diner, the shape of the soffit above the bar traces the outline of Japan’s main island, directly referencing the foreign geography in its decor. It is worth noting that Fong’s parents would have known the atrocities of Japanese occupation in China, and thus their generation was likely to have viewed the Japanese as enemies. Fong’s openness to working with the Japanese American community reflects a certain generosity and agency in her pursuits. Located at 6710 La Tijera Boulevard, Pann’s still stands today. According to Fong’s friend, historic preservationist John English, Pann’s was one of the first projects Fong took ownership for, claiming initiative in the design process. The coffee shop is uniquely sited on a triangular lot between three busy boulevards. Planting surrounds the large windows of the coffee shop to buffer customers inside from the traffic outside. Chu suggested that Fong was influenced by her city planning education and designed the coffee shop to have different zones of activity. Booth seating is fixed, decidedly inflexible. Fong purposefully sets booth seating adjacent to windows and perpendicular to circulation aisles. She tucks the restrooms behind a wall, so people can enter and exit discreetly. Chunky partitions rise up to seated eye-level height between tables in an island zone of the restaurant to provide more separation between dining parties. The partitions and exposed backs of the booths appear to be a dark-brown veneered material, matching the dark tone of the floors, which act as a muted background for the bright orange and white seating. There is a linear soffit above the bar that follows the bend of the restaurant, making the bar seating feel more intimate. The downturned roof is legible from the exterior while creating a dynamic ceiling in the interior. Fong works in both section and plan; the outline of the roof in plan looks like a pointed bow tie. Pann’s demonstrates Fong’s attention to multiple scales, from massing to detail. The entry features lucite door handles. Chu speculated that grabbing the transparent material and being able to feel its solidity and manipulate it must have been a marvelous sensation when the coffee shop first opened in 1958. Fong is decisive yet sensitive.

As we start to incorporate once-overlooked figures in the canon, it is imperative to seek knowledge from multiple contexts. By attuning to the fragments of evidence we have, we might construct a restorative historiography that includes possibilities of individual agency, reimagining the spaces women fill in history and can pursue in the present.