Architect Martin Stern moved to Los Angeles, California, in the 1930s to work as a motion picture studio sketch artist. In Los Angeles, Stern was best known for the three Ships coffee shops opened in 1956 and 1957 by the late Emmett Shipman, who got the nickname "Ships" when he served in the Navy.

The Ships at Wilshire Boulevard and Glendon Avenue in Westwood served hearty comfort food such as chicken pot pies and half-pound hamburgers 24 hours a day for 27 years. It was razed in 1984, despite protests by preservationists, and replaced by a 22 story office building.

Two other Ships, at 1016 La Cienega Blvd., and 10705 Washington Blvd., in Culver City, also served the familiar fare and, as in Westwood, featured a toaster at each table. They closed in 1955. The Culver City Ships, an example of architecture once considered impossibly kitschy but now revered is a Starbucks coffeehouse.

Leon Whiteson, who wrote about architecture for the Los Angeles TImes, noted in a 1988 article that the Westwood Ships, with its distinctive orange color scheme and boomerang trusses that resembled a rocket ship ready to blast off, "was recognized by architectural historians and local residents as a masterpiece of the flamboyant Googie-style design."

Whiteson in a 1990 article explained the style as a "wonderfully weird" blend of Frank Lloyd Wright, Bauhaus Modernism and Las Vegas neon, jazzed up by Space Age images."

"Coffee shop designers were clearly gifted," he wrote, listing Stern "among others (who) created a popular architecture that was purely American in its confidence in a techno future unencumbered by history or elite European notions of taste."

When Stern made his original foray into Las Vegas in 1953, that city, like Los Angeles, shaped architecture according to the vast spaces available. The result were low-rises, wide-flung wings of rooms surrounding great outdoor swimming pools. Stern's first project was a low-rise room addition for the Sahara Hotel.

But that would soon change, and Stern was largely responsible. He designed the Sahara's first skyscraper which was 14 stories in 1959, its convention facility in 1967, a 342 room high rise addition in 1977, and another 625 room high rise addition in 1979.

In the mid-1960s, Stern, working for Howard Hughes, created the new expansion tower for the Sands Hotel, moving some of its original two-story structures to provide the space. The original Sands was redesigned by architect Wayne McAllister.

In the same period, Stern also lifted downtown Las Vegas skyward with a 26 story, 300 room, building for the Mint Hotel, and signaled a major change in the city's architecture by designing the megalithic triform International Hotel (now Las Vegas Hilton).

Stern followed that with the MGM Grand Hotel in 1971 (now Bally's), the last of his Strip monuments. He continued, however, to redesign and expand the Sahara, Riviera, and the El Rancho (Thunderbird/Silverbird) hotels well into the 1980s.

In Reno and Tahoe, he designed Harrah's and the MGM Grand among others, and for Atlantic City the Showboat and Playboy properties.

One of Stern's most fascinating projects was never built: the proposed Las Vegas resort Xanadu, planned by Donald Trump for the site where the Excalibur was later constructed. Trump's financing fell through, and Stern's innovative mastaba-shaped complex with a vast atrium and step-back rooms (preaging the later Luxor) was confined to his architectural drawings now housed at UNLV.

Stern died on July 28, 2001, at age 84, in Los Angeles. Stern was survived by his wife, Chantal; three sons and one daughter; a sister; and four grandchildren.