The deuce you say!

These are undated, unsigned drawings for a 100-room “Riviera Villa” motel for M.K. Doumani, found in the Harry Hayden Whiteley Architectural Records (MS-00134) at UNLV Special Collections & Archives. 

Doumani’s motel was designed by the firm Paul Revere Williams Associates of Los Angeles. It opened as La Concha Motel in June 1961. 

A familiar origin story is told for several Williams projects: “I sat across his desk from him while he drew a sketch, backwards and upside down,” M.K.'s son Ed Doumani says in Dorothy Wright’s Desert Companion article in 2012. 

The surviving drawings, however, raise additional questions. The distinctive lobby form closely resembles Félix Candela’s Los Manantiales restaurant in Mexico City (‘58), and is also reminiscent of the La Concha Resort in San Juan, Puerto Rico, designed by Osvaldo Toro, Miguel Ferrer, and Charles H. Warner Jr. (‘56). Likewise, the sweeping concrete form of Guardian Angel Cathedral - another Las Vegas project by Paul Revere Williams Associates - has often been noted for its resemblance to Candela’s Medalla de la Virgen Milagrosa Church in Mexico City (‘54).

The architect most directly involved in the project’s development may instead have been Harry Hayden Whiteley, a Williams associate who lived and worked in Las Vegas. Whiteley joined the Las Vegas chapter of the AIA in 1944 and was licensed to practice in Nevada, whereas Williams was not. The La Concha drawings preserved in Whiteley’s archive resemble other shell-inspired concepts found among his papers. Whether Whiteley was the principal designer, the supervising architect, or simply retained project records remains uncertain.

For now, the surviving evidence does not resolve Whiteley’s role. The records of Paul Revere Williams Associates, acquired by USC & Getty in 2020, have not yet been made available to researchers, leaving important questions about the design process unanswered.

The motel closed in 2004. The lobby was preserved and now serves as the visitor center for the Neon Museum, Las Vegas.

• Also read: The work of Paul Revere Williams in Las Vegas

• Street View: Los Manantiales, Mexico City

(1-4) are from the Whiteley Architectural Records, (5) is a postcard.