CRITIQUE Rising Above the Ordinary : Sanwa Bank Plaza, 777 Tower Show Class Predecessors Lack

In the past 20 years many office towers have sprung up in downtown Los Angeles.

Created by a collaboration between private developers and public officials, these skyscrapers have come to symbolize Los Angeles’ rising profile as a major financial and business center on the Pacific Rim.

The symbolism is powerful, but the architecture of the towers that embody it has all too often been mediocre and unimaginative. Few of our skyscrapers have manifested a quality of design to match Los Angeles’ official conceit that it is a “world-class city.”

From the late 1960s through the ‘70s and ‘80s one crude glass- or stone-clad shaft after another has risen on the new downtown skyline.

Prominent among these were the Union Bank Building on Figueroa and Fifth (1968); the twin black towers of Arco Plaza on Flower between Fifth and Sixth (1971); the white shaft of the United California Bank Building, now the First Interstate Tower, on Hope and Wilshire (1973); Security Pacific Plaza on Flower and Third (1974); the cylindrical glass Bonaventure Hotel on Flower between Fourth and Fifth (1976), and the Wells Fargo Building, (1979), across the street from the Bonaventure.

These early high-rises were more often than not straight-up-and-down exercises in modernist geometry. Lacking interesting detail or visual complexity, such sleek glass and concrete boxes quickly became boring when viewed from city streets day after day.

The towers built in the 1980s often appeared more architecturally ambitious, yet few lived up to their promise.

The decade’s major achievement was the Crocker Center, now the Wells Fargo Center, on Bunker Hill, completed in 1983. Although the three towers of the center are fairly standard granite-faced shafts, they are designed to create an urbane series of public spaces at plaza level.

The major 1980s failures were the One California Plaza tower and the tallest-in-the-West First Interstate World Center.

The character of these two skyscrapers seems confused and half-baked, due in part to the fact that they were shaped more by complex financial and political deals and compromises than by any consideration of the quality of design expression or urban amenity.

n both projects such ques tionable practices as density transfers and the influence exerted by insider politics rode roughshod over aesthetics, with the inevitable consequences for architecture.

The 1980s’ oddest towers attempted a postmodern panache that seemed to lack real conviction or any true sense of place.

The mock-French Provincial Home Savings Tower on Seventh and Figueroa looks like a displaced, poor-man’s version of Manhattan’s famed Plaza Hotel. At street level its layout is complicated by the Metro station that dominates its main corner, forcing the real entry to the building to a location on an upper level, hidden “sky lobby.”

The stunted Coast Savings Building on Wilshire seems unable to decide whether to be a skyscraper or not. Its rounded elevations, which give the building the look of a monster ship’s funnel, are divided into segments three floors high, giving it an odd sense of scale.

Among this collection of the occasionally good, the frequently bad and the sometimes downright ugly, we still await Los Angeles’ equivalent of Manhattan’s Chrysler or Empire State buildings, or even San Francisco’s quirky Transamerica Tower. No skyscraper yet provides an image to epitomize the city’s evolving urban character.

However, two recently completed towers on Figueroa Street have raised the quality of downtown high-rise architecture above the ordinary.

Both the 777 Tower and the Sanwa Bank Plaza, at the northwest corner of Figueroa and Wilshire Boulevard, carry a touch of class absent from most of their neighbors and predecessors.

The Sanwa Bank Plaza, designed by A. C. Martin & Associates, is a colorful 52-story granite, glass and bronze skyscraper fronted by two graceful atrium lobbies. The 53-story 777 Tower, designed by Cesar Pelli & Associates Inc., is clad in white metal carefully detailed and devised to create a crisp profile against the whitish-blue Southland sky.

The Sanwa tower, created by a team led by principal architect David Martin, is set back at a 45-degree angle to Wilshire and Figueroa. This angled setback provides the space for a series of interesting outdoor spaces that link the tower to the life of the surrounding streets.

Dramatic, glass-enclosed lobbies along Figueroa and Sixth make a celebration of the act of entering the Sanwa tower. They are the most elegantly spacious commercial building entries in Los Angeles.

Over 80 feet tall and wide, the lobbies offer a progression of formal steps that makes the transition from exterior to interior spaces a truly urbane pleasure. The shaded, airy spaces are enclosed by metallic lattice screens with a Japanese flavor that step back as they rise.

These screens flood the interiors with muted stripes of light, bringing out the richness of the beige and ocher marbles and granites that pave the floors and cover the walls. The areas around the elevator banks and throughout the main ground floor level continue this high quality of design. Rich Brazilian granite, lush Italian stonework and a translucent Portuguese marble create an air of unforced opulence rare in downtown.

These are spaces designed for ceremony, even though most of the people who work in or visit the tower will arrive first at the unadorned underground garage.

Above the lobby level, however, the Sanwa tower loses much of its aesthetic assurance.

The chunky tower sets back toward an octagonal crown in a somewhat heavy-handed integration of glass and stone vertical strips. Corners are chamfered, bays are recessed, and bronze window panels and mullions break up the glazed areas. But the proportions are clunky and the details are flat and dull.

The verve that gave such life to the Sanwa lobbies fades as the tower rises.

By contrast, the 777 Tower is conventional at its base but subtle in the treatment of its vertical character.

Pelli’s tower is downtown’s most assured modern commercial high-rise. Sheathed in an off-white steel curtain wall system, the skyscraper has subtle profiles and strong silhouettes. Rounded mullions alternate with knife-edged surfaces that transform the hard Los Angeles’ light into a symphony of sharp shadows.

Where the top of the tower steps back, delicate projecting cornices emphasize the transition against the bright sky.

A further subtlety is the widening of the spacing of the window mullions from the center to the edges of the rounded east and west facades. This adds to the sense of curvature and emphasizes the tower’s vertical thrust.

The restraint of the off-white exterior is abandoned in the 777 Tower’s three-story lobby. Sweeps of red, green and ocher marble add grandeur to the deliberately oversized scale of the volumes. An escalator links the lobby to the upper levels of Citicorp Plaza and the Seventh Market Place.

Taken together, looking south down Figueroa, the two new towers excite the eye.

For a few blocks, between Sixth and Eighth streets, one has an inkling of how attractive Los Angeles’ new downtown might have been if its financiers, policy-makers and designers had had the sophistication to insist from the start upon a high quality of architecture.

An interesting fact about both the Sanwa Bank Plaza and the 777 Tower is that they were created by designers with a special relationship to Los Angeles.

A. C. Martin & Associates is a third-generation Los Angeles practice founded in 1906. Several of the earlier downtown high-rises mentioned above, including Arco Plaza, Security Pacific Plaza, the Wells Fargo and Union Bank buildings came out of its office.

The firm also had a hand in the design of such Los Angeles landmarks as the Million Dollar Theatre on Broadway and City Hall.

Cesar Pelli spent 13 years in Los Angeles, between 1964 and 1977. In that time he designed the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood as well as several modernist Wilshire Boulevard office buildings.

“In this city I formed my style and launched my career. Here’s where I became an American architect,” said the Argentine-born designer, who now practices out of New Haven, Conn.

In contrast to Cesar Pelli and David Martin, the architects from Canada and New York City who created One California Plaza and the First Interstate World Center seem to have little appreciation of or concern for Los Angeles’ particular urban quality. They lack a sensitivity to the city as a particular set of climatic, social and visual characteristics.

Pelli and Martin understand the town and its peculiarities. They know that it is not quite like any other major U.S. metropolis in its architectural traditions, which include few true skyscrapers.

Our downtown skyline is not that of Dallas or Denver or Manhattan, and a designer contemplating the creation of a Los Angeles high-rise needs to think about this carefully.

The kind of localized response to place demonstrated in the 777 Tower and the Sanwa Bank Plaza is a lead all designers of the city’s future skyscrapers should follow.

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