Killingsworth received a bachelor of architecture degree from the University of Southern California in 1940 with cum laude honors and was awarded an AIA medal for the highest academic record in architecture. He then served in the army for five years.
In 1950 John Entenza, the editor of Arts & Architecture, drove past Killingsworth’s first solo project, a post-and-beam office and residence for his in-laws, and soon after invited the architect to par-ticipate in the Case Study program. “I owe my life to John Entenza,” Killingsworth would later say.
Killingsworth, Brady, and Smith designed four Case Study Houses for Entenza, including #23, in La Jolla, known as the “Triad,” which consisted of three detached but related residences; #25, which was built on a canal in Long Beach for Ed Frank, owner of the Frank Brothers furniture store; and #26, which was to feature prefabricated concrete–and–styrene foam construction but was never built. Case Study Apartment #2, a design for ten units in Newport Beach, California, also was never constructed.
Rigorously attentive to construction detail, Killingsworth only designed one home outside of Southern California. It is located in Piedmont, California, and still extant.
While on vacation in Oslo, Norway, Joyce and Richard Opdahl walked into a room at the United States embassy, only to come face-to-face with four oversized photos of their home. “It was a traveling exhibition from the AIA,” recalls Joyce. “I was stunned, but you couldn’t just walk up to someone random and say, ‘Hey! That’s our house!’”
In 1962 Killingsworth was selected as the master planning architect for California State University Long Beach. With campus landscape designer Ed Lovell, he planted over 2,000 Helen Borcher peach trees.
In 1964 Killingsworth designed the ten-story, 300-room Kahala Hilton in
Killingsworth and his partners went on to design more big-name resorts, including the Kapalua Bay Hotel (now demolished) on Maui in 1978, the Mauna Lani Bay Hotel on the Big Island, in 1983, and Waikiki’s Halekulani Hotel in 1984.
In 1990 Condé Nast Traveler magazine ranked all four of Killingsworth’s Hawaii projects as the top four tropical-resort hotels in the world.
In September of 2005 CSULB posthumously dedicated Killingsworth Plaza to the architect, who guided the campus’s growth for over four decades and never once charged for his services.
