Los Angeles Skyline

Look at downtown Los Angeles and nearly every tower built between the mid-seventies and 2014 is flat on top. That is not taste. A 1974 fire regulation required every high-rise to provide a rooftop helipad for emergency landings, and a helipad needs a flat roof. For forty years the city could not build a spire, a crown or a pitched top.

The rule was relaxed in 2014, and the Wilshire Grand Center went up with a spire — the first downtown tower in decades allowed to finish in a point. The skyline now has a single exception standing among forty years of flat roofs, and a model that gets that detail right reads as Los Angeles instantly.

Until 1957 Los Angeles capped building height at 150 feet because of earthquake risk. City Hall, completed in 1928 at 454 feet, was exempt — so for three decades it was the only tall structure in the city, standing by itself above a low horizontal downtown.

When the cap lifted, everything arrived at once and in the same idiom, which is why downtown LA has far less stylistic layering than Chicago or New York. The towers around City Hall are a different generation entirely, and the 1928 building still reads as an outsider in its own skyline.

Downtown is compact enough that the whole cluster fits in one view. The Wilshire Grand Center leads with its sail-like crown and spire — the one tower permitted to finish in a point. Beside it the U.S. Bank Tower, cylindrical and flat-topped, held the title of tallest in the western United States for twenty-six years.

The Aon Center is the plain black rectangle, the Gas Company Tower carries its blue glass crown, and the Ritz-Carlton at L.A. Live sits slightly apart to the south. City Hall stands low and white in front of all of it, a 1928 building among towers from the eighties onward, and it remains the shape most people picture when they picture Los Angeles.