The Los Angeles City Council has voted to support a Historic Cultural Monument (HCM) application for the Union Bank Square complex in Downtown Los Angeles.
The designation makes the 40-story office tower, designed by New York City architects Harrison & Abramovitz in conjunction with A.C. Martin & Associates in 1967, the first downtown skyscraper in the city to receive this rarefied designation. The tower complex features a 2.25-acre tree-filled plaza at its base that is situated above a retail and parking plinth. The plaza is designed by Garrett Eckbo of Eckbo, Dean, Austin & Williams, one of the most prominent landscape architects of the post-World War II era.
Harrison & Abramovitz built widely around the country, as well, especially in New York City; Among the most famous works of the firm are the former Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center, the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, and the original CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
According to the Los Angeles Conservancy, the group that spearheaded the HCM nomination process, the tower is designed in the Corporate International style and was the first building completed in the Bunker Hill Urban Renewal Project, a massive 1960s-era initiative that replaced an existing Victorian-era residential district with what would become the city's financial core. Today, the tower is surrounded by a collection of other corporate and postmodern high-rises and is flanked on one side by the 110-freeway. When the Union Square tower was first built, it existed as the tallest building in the city, a title it held for just one year.
The HCM nomination was initiated in part because, as Urbanize.LA reported last year, the current owners of the property, KBS, and architects HKW International drew up a $20 million renovation plan for the plaza and lobby spaces included in the complex. The LA Conservancy has stated that the building owner has been supportive of the historic nomination, it is unclear if the renovations will proceed as planned.
News of the renovations was enough to prompt The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) to add the plaza to it's Landslide demolition watchlist, however.
The paved plaza features a series of freeform interlocking shallow pools, fountains, and lawns overlaid with a grid of trees and planters. The design, according to the TCLF website, was created by Eckbo to provide a "quiet, shaded, water-cooled retreat from the noise, confusion, and austerity of downtown streets."
The plaza was documented in 2015 via the Historic American Landscapes Survey, TCLF reports, a survey that found the plaza in "good condition. The survey added that the spaces are “well patronized on business days, with built elements remaining largely as they were when first constructed…Cracks in the concrete are visible, and the wood benches need repainting, but otherwise, the materials of the original construction are holding up well to the environment and usage patterns.”
10 Comments
Hooray! Its about time.
The proposed renovations look stupid and generic.
Agreed-- one of the few elegant highrises in DTLA. I couldn't find a good close-up, but the facade is beautifully detailed in concrete and glass, and must extend a few feet from external face to interior. None of the flatness that characterizes most office towers.
The recent monochromatic paint job (aerial view 2nd from top) actually highlights this detailing and depth. Congrats to the Martin firm.
I can't even...
How odd!
Yeah. The preservation movement came about to save beautiful old buildings and now it's been used to preserve unsustainable corporate modernist skyscrapers. Odd indeed.
Of the adjectives you used in the first half of your sentence, one can be quantified and the other -GASP- cannot.
Thank God beauty can't be quantified, or else computers would take over the world!!!
Yeah, computers are definitely never going to take over the world because beauty cannot be quantified. Hit the nail on the head, there. Why does your thumb resemble a nail? That's weird...
Whatever you say SnarkyPete.
Exactly how I see it, Thayer-Duh.
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