Anthony Lumsden, known as Tony, served as design director at Daniel, Mann, Johnson and Mendenhall, the large architecture and engineering firm, from 1968 to 1993. While there he designed or co-designed prominent buildings including the Manufacturers Bank in Beverly Hills, Federal Aviation Administration offices in Hawthorne and the Century Bank Plaza in Century City.

With their taut, reflective glass facades, these buildings relied on a technique that Lumsden, along with Cesar Pelli, the architect who hired him at DMJM, pioneered in the late 1960s. The two architects were the first to discover the range of architectural possibilities opened up by turning a building's mullions – the vertical elements dividing one window from the next -- to face in rather than out. By keeping the mullions virtually flush with the rest of the exterior skin, Pelli and Lumsden were able to entirely smooth over, rather than express, the structural skeleton underneath.