5900 Wilshire Building

The 5900 Wilshire Building is an International Style skyscraper designed by William Pereira & Associates, with Gin Wong as lead architect, in association with Welton Becket and Associates, and built between 1968 and 1971 in Los Angeles, CA.

5900 Wilshire Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. It is common for companies to want to attach their names to iconic buildings when they move in, or for the general public to come up with nicknames, and this one is no exception. The 5900 Wilshire Building is also known, or has been known as, People's Bank Building, or Mutual Benefit Life Building.

Its precise street address is 5900 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA. You can also find it on the map here.

The building has been restored 2 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 2007 and 2020.

William Pereira & Associates, with Gin Wong as the lead architect, was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design, in association with Welton Becket and Associates.

The 5900 Wilshire Building can be categorized as an International Style building.

The 5900 Wilshire Building uses a framed tube-in-tube structure , with steel columns and concrete slabs.

A framed tube-in-tube structure uses a central core, known as inner tube, which usually holds stairs, lifts and installations, and a perimeter of columns around it, which form the exterior tube. The interior tube is tipically more massive (often made of reinforced concrete), and the exterior tube is "lighter" (made of steel or concrete columns). Both tubes are conencted via horizontal elements which make up the floors and also transmit any horizontal froces from the facade to the core.

The facade of the building is load bearing. This is a direct consequence of the integration of the exterior "tube" into the facade, something which most framed tube-in-tube buildings do in order to liberate the interior space from structural elements and achieve a more flexible interior.

So the facade of the builing is techinically load-bearing, yes, however, in between the load-bearing colums we find a curtain-wall type of facade, which by itself would not be cosnidered load-bearing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features 12 narrow bays which are defined by the exterior row of pillars from the tube-in-tube structure. The pillars are finished with white concrete. Within each bay there's a continuous dark-tinted curtain wall with no spandrels..