Wells Fargo Center (Los Angeles)

Wells Fargo Center
Wells Fargo Tower (left), and KPMG Tower
Alternative names	Crocker Center Crocker Center North & South Wells Fargo Center I & II IBM Tower
General information
Type	Commercial offices
Location	333 S. Grand Avenue Los Angeles, California
Construction started	1981
Completed	1983
Owner	Maguire Properties Thomas Properties Group
Management	MPG Office Trust
Height
Roof	Tower I: 220.37 m (723.0 ft) Tower II: 170.69 m (560.0 ft)
Technical details
Floor count	Tower I: 54 Tower II: 45
Floor area	Tower I: 1,391,000 sq ft (129,200 m2) Tower II: 1,140,000 sq ft (106,000 m2)
Lifts/elevators	Tower I: 29 Tower II: 26
Design and construction
Architect(s)	Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
Developer	Maguire Properties Thomas Properties Group
Structural engineer	Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
Main contractor	Turner Construction
References

Wells Fargo Center is a twin tower skyscraper complex in downtown Los Angeles, California, comprising Wells Fargo Tower and KPMG Tower joined by a three-story glass atrium. The project received the 1986–1987 and 2003-2004 Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) Office Building of the Year Award and numerous others. Wells Fargo History Museums is located at the center.

Wells Fargo Tower

Wells Fargo Tower (Tower I), at 220 m (720 ft) it is the tallest building of the complex. It has 54 floors and it is the 7th tallest building in Los Angeles, and the 92nd-tallest building in the United States. When it opened in 1983, it was known as the Crocker Tower, named after San Francisco-based Crocker National Bank. Crocker merged with Wells Fargo in 1986.

During initial construction it was featured in the 1983 film, Blue Thunder, and the top upper floors were not completed during filming, so Roy Scheider's character shot a helicopter chasing him from the unfinished top floor.

Anchor tenants

• Wells Fargo Bank (Floors 1,5,7,9,11,12)
• Payden & Rygel (Floors 32-34)
• Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher (Floors 44–53)
• Oaktree Capital Management (Floors 23-25, 27–30, 34)

KPMG Tower

KPMG Tower (Tower II) is 171 m (561 ft), and was completed in 1983 with 45 floors. It is the 17th tallest building in the city.

Anchor tenants

• Latham & Watkins (Floors 1–11,14)
• KPMG (Floors 18–23)
• Reed Smith (Floors 26-29)
• The Boston Consulting Group (Floors 31-32)
• Munger, Tolles & Olson (Floors 34–39)
• Bingham McCutchen (Floors 42–45)

Fredric Jameson

Cultural critic Fredric Jameson used Skidmore, Owings and Merrill's Crocker Bank Center (as it was then named) as an example of what he sees as postmodern architecture's "depthlessness":

Nor is this depthlessness merely metaphorical: it can be experienced physically and literally by anyone who, mounting what used to be Raymond Chandler’s Beacon Hill from the great Chicano markets on Broadway and 4th St. in downtown Los Angeles, suddenly confronts the great free-standing wall of the Crocker Bank Center (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) -- a surface which seems to be unsupported by any volume, or whose putative volume (rectangular, trapezoidal?) is ocularly quite undecidable. This great sheet of windows, with its gravity-defying two-dimensionality, momentarily transforms the solid ground on which we climb into the contents of a stereopticon, pasteboard shapes profiling themselves here and there around us. From all sides, the visual effect is the same: as fateful as the great monolith in Kubrick’s 2001 which confronts its viewers like an enigmatic destiny, a call to evolutionary mutation. If this new multinational downtown ... effectively abolished the older ruined city fabric which it violently replaced, cannot something similar be said about the way in which this strange new surface in its own peremptory way renders our older systems of perception of the city somehow archaic and aimless, without offering another in their place?

See also

• List of tallest buildings in Los Angeles

Further reading

• Cameron, Robert (1990). Above Los Angeles. San Francisco: Cameron & Company. ISBN 0-918684-48-X.