All the Way From Memphis

Teotihuacan? Paris? Luxor? Las Vegas? No way do those places have a corner on pyramids. For starters, we have Cal State Long Beach’s bright blue, 18-story sports center, officially known as The Pyramid, the largest space-frame building in North America. There’s the classic 1895 stone pyramid in Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery, the resting place of the Shatto family, and the nearby Lewis and Emma A. Grigsby mausoleum, an elegant, 1930s black marble-faced pyramid with a scarab-adorned Theban entryway. All six ACC Smog Chek stations are truncated pyramids. Sculptor Isamu Noguchi’s extraordinary 1981 outdoor installation, “California Scenario,” at South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, includes a mystical white Sierra granite pyramid form. And though we don’t have the world’s oldest pyramid or even the biggest, we do have a renowned upside-down one. It’s UC San Diego’s eight-story Audrey and Theodor Geisel Library. When Audrey Geisel donated $20 million to the library, she noted that her husband--better known as Dr. Seuss--once said that he might have designed a building very much like it. Now that’s pyramid power.