Wilshire Grand Center

The Wilshire Grand Center isn’t the most famous tower in Los Angeles, but it is the tallest. At 1,100 feet and 73 stories, the glass spire on the corner of Wilshire and Figueroa is the highest building west of the Mississippi River, and its sail-topped crown gave downtown a skyline marker that didn’t exist before 2017.

Project Scope

AC Martin Partners designed the building, and Turner Construction delivered it as a design-build partner for owner Hanjin International, the U.S. arm of the South Korean conglomerate that also owns Korean Air. The program mixes a hotel and Class A office space in a single supertall, roughly 2.1 million square feet in all, topped by a luminous crown and spire that push the structure past the 1,000-foot mark.

The build is best remembered for one record-setting day. In February 2014 the project poured its foundation in a single continuous operation that ran around 18 hours, one of the largest continuous concrete pours in construction history at the time. That mat foundation set the base for a tower that broke the long-standing rule requiring flat roofs on L.A. high-rises, since the city changed its code to allow the spired top.

Why It Matters

The Wilshire Grand reset what downtown Los Angeles could look like. For decades the city’s tallest buildings had to wear flat helipad roofs, which produced a skyline of blunt boxes. Winning approval for a sculpted crown opened the door for the more expressive towers that followed, and it signaled that L.A. was ready to compete on architecture, not just square footage. It stands among the landmark commercial supertalls reshaping American downtowns, alongside towers like New York’s One Vanderbilt.

The project also marked a serious foreign bet on the L.A. core. Hanjin’s investment brought a flagship hotel and modern office floors to a market that had thinned out, and it helped seed the residential and commercial momentum that downtown has carried since. Nearly a decade on, the building’s crown still reads as the easiest way to find downtown on the horizon.

Project Team & Details