Tower reigns as tallest west of the Mississippi
LOS ANGELES — The Wilshire Grand Center, the tallest building west of the Mississippi River, opened its doors on Friday in once-stodgy downtown Los Angeles, which is sprouting a crop of new skyscrapers.
The 73-story building has a huge spire that brings its height to 1,100 feet, topping the nearby U.S. Bank Tower by more than 80 feet. The Bank Tower had held the west of the Mississippi height record since 1989.
Critics might argue that a spire rising nearly 200 feet above the top of the building should not count, but it meets the criteria of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, which lists the world’s tallest buildings based on the “architectural top of the building.” A 2-foot lightning rod at the very top, however, doesn’t count.
The skyscraper is still dwarfed by buildings on the East Coast and overseas. In the United States, One World Trade Center is 1,776 feet tall, making it the sixth-largest completed building in the world. The tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, rises 2,717 feet, or more than a half-mile high.
The building, in the Financial District, cost about $1.2 billion to build. Construction began in 2014.
It reached a milestone that year when 21,200 cubic yards of concrete, weighing 82 million pounds, were poured over a span of 18 hours to create the foundation. That broke the Guinness World Record for a continuous pour set during the 1999 construction of The Venetian hotel and casino in Las Vegas.
The record was eclipsed again this April when a foundation for a mall was poured in the United Arab Emirates.
The tower includes a massive, stabilizing central core and braces designed to act as shock absorbers to withstand gusty Santa Ana winds and earthquakes. Southern California has dozens of faults, and the building is designed to withstand about a magnitude-7.5 temblor.