Mathews: Two skyscrapers with too much in common
This is a tale of two new skyscrapers - and of two cities that have more in common than they care to admit.
The Wilshire Grand Center towers 73 stories and 1,100 feet over downtown Los Angeles, making it the tallest building west of the Mississippi River. A project of the conglomerate that owns Korean Air Lines, it opened this summer.
The Salesforce Tower, which takes its name from the cloud computing giant that will occupy it, rises 61 stories and 1,070 feet over the South of Market district in San Francisco. When it opens in early 2018, it will be the second-tallest building west of the Mississippi.
Each building has literally changed its city's skyline. Considered together, however, they make a more earthbound and less flattering point about the state of the California imagination.
The Wilshire Grand, like Los Angeles, is skinny and well-lit. But up close, it feels remote even though it's in the middle of a metropolis. Reaching the Wilshire Grand on foot isn't easy, given how it's cut off by Interstate 110 on one side and Wilshire Boulevard's and Figueroa Street's heavy traffic on two others.
And although the building is touted as a gift to Los Angeles, it doesn't engage the public at the street level. And when you enter, you're pointed in the direction of an elevator that takes you up to its most significant space the public can access - the 70th floor lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel, which has terrific views of the city. (You can go up three floors from there if you're willing to spend money at restaurants or bars).
While the hotel lobby offers great views of Los Angeles, the whole structure reveals the city's weaknesses and dependencies. Because L.A.'s relatively stagnant economy has produced a glut of office space, it's been tricky to lease the space in the tower. And since the building is built by a foreign company - Korean Air Lines and the Hanjin Group - it serves as yet another reminder that L.A. is really more an overgrown outpost of other powers than the Pacific Rim capital it purports to be. After all, its major institutions - from some major movie studios, to the Los Angeles Times, to the Dodgers - are controlled by out-of-towners.
By contrast, Salesforce Tower seems to be of a piece with San Francisco, for better and for worse. Like the Bay Area's tech industry, the skyscraper is a dominant, almost menacing presence hanging over the city. The tower's city connections are deliberate: A bridge connects it to a park atop the still-under-construction Transbay Transit Center. The building also has a street-level plaza and a massive, glass-door lobby opening right onto Mission Street.
But the Salesforce Tower embodies a San Francisco paradox. This place that produces technology to connect the world can feel small and insular. Between the new skyscraper and two buildings across the street, Salesforce is creating its own campus within the city. The park itself is billed as a sort of bariatric chamber (a place “to re-center”) to keep workers from getting the bends in the real world. Within this rarified air, there are retail and stores to satisfy workers' every need. “It's all right here. Right now,” says proclaims the tower's publicity.
The preciousness of the project cries out for parody. The building has no corners - it's all curves. The building also literally breathes, with “innovative outside air intakes on every floor” that “provide outdoor-fresh air to each occupant to support health and wellness.” The interior is expected to include “mindfulness zones.”
Such touches fit the only-from-San Francisco corporate culture of Salesforce, which wraps relentless acquisitiveness (now more than 24,000 employees and $8.4 billion in annual revenues), in touchy-feely corporate language that appropriates the Hawaiian concept of “Ohana,” or extended family. An excerpt from the most recent annual report: “We are the #SalesforceOhana, a trusted family of employees, customers, partners and communities, united around delivering success to all of our stakeholders and improving the state of the world. Our Ohana propels us forward and we nurture it as we grow.”
For all the municipal differences that the two skyscrapers reflect, what's most striking is just how similar they are.
Both are glass towers designed for maximum environmental sustainability and earthquake safety. Both seek to capitalize on enormous growth in the neighborhoods below. Both have a statement near their top - an open-air bar on the 73rd floor of the Wilshire Grand,and an LED-based artwork at the Salesforce Tower that is billed as the world's highest piece of public art.
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