Skyscrapers: From Here to Eternity : High Office: What It’s Like to Look Down on the World
It’s the tallest building west of the Mississippi: a 73-story, 1,018-foot spire that skewers the smog and adds one more vertical element to a once horizontal city.
But employees at the First Interstate World Center, at 633 W. 5th St. in downtown Los Angeles, don’t seem impressed with the building’s record-breaking height or its interior opulence.
Those who ride the high-style, high-speed (1,400 feet per minute) elevators think opulence is nice, but efficiency is nicer. And since the kinks aren’t yet out of the elevator system, workers tend to talk about “getting stuck” or “dropping” precipitously more than anything else.
So far, two tenants occupy offices in the building: the accounting firm of Arthur Andersen & Co., with 1,000 employees on floors 24 through 32, and the Latham & Watkins law firm, with 700 employees on floors 35 through 45.
Hwai-Tang Chen, an executive with Arthur Andersen, giggled at the memory of a walk down 22 flights of stairs to go to lunch. The elevator “just stopped,” she said.
She loves the new building because “it’s not square” and “square is boring.”
Lawrence Glascott, an Arthur Andersen partner, agrees. The building’s oval shape with curved, floor-to-ceiling glass windows for almost every office may have made him more of a “free-form thinker.”
“I don’t have the feeling of being in a square or rectangular room, which is a very unusual feeling for an accountant,” he said, smiling. Of course he has no corners in his office, either, which could be disconcerting to a mind trained to look for some to cut.
Nohemi Monarrez, executive receptionist for the firm, is proud to tell her friends she works in the “tallest building.” But what really thrills her, she said, is that “the ladies’ rooms are roomier, the lighting is good, they have hooks to hang things on” and there are electrical outlets for “curling irons and blow dryers.”
The Feb. 28 earthquake did not thrill her, but she felt safe. “My desk bounced around and I enjoyed the ride.” (The building has a public address system that reaches every floor. After the quake, building management announced, “We have just survived a major earthquake.”)
Down in the lobby one day last week, actor James Stacy had finished his business at the First Interstate Bank branch at ground level and was riding in his motorized wheelchair up a ramp to the parking garage. “This ramp is wonderful,” he enthused. “It is designed as an integral part of the lobby architecture. The only trouble is, I can’t get out unless I do this,” he said, aiming his chair at the glass door and gunning his motor. Stacy said the builders must have forgotten to put a door-opening button at wheelchair height.
“On a good day, you can see Catalina,” said a workman on his way to the 73rd floor, which is not yet ready for occupancy. Indeed, you can see much more than that. The three-ring Bonaventure Hotel looks like a toy. The Union Bank and Arco buildings look, well, puny. The helicopter traffic is way below you, instead of overhead. And the panoramic view of intersecting freeways, colorful moving cars, drifting clouds and other objects is somehow reminiscent of watching an ant farm.
But as Joseph J. Pinola, chairman and chief executive officer of First Interstate Bancorp, which will occupy the highest floor, once said: “If you have time to look out the window, the company should get someone else to do the job.”
