Gas Company Tower

The Gas Company Tower is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with Richard Keating as lead architect, and built between 1988 and 1991 in Los Angeles, CA.

Gas Company Tower is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as SoCal Gas Center.

Its precise street address is 555 West 5th Street , Los Angeles, CA. You can also find it on the map here.

The Gas Company Tower has received multiple architecture awards for its architectural design since 1991. The following is a list of such prizes and awards:

• California Council of the American Institute of Architects: Merit Award in 1992
• LA Area Chamber of Commerce: Beautification Award in 1994

The lobby of the buidling is quite unique. It features a window wall which offers a unique view of a mural by Frank Stella titled "Dusk", which is actually not in the building, but painted on the side of the adjacent building.

Between the mural and the lobbty there's also a water installation made up by hundreds of small jets that align in rows and extend under the glass wall of the lobby through transparent strips on the floor.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with Richard Keating as the lead architect, was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

That being said, architecture is a complex discipline involving many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the Gas Company Tower a reality:

• Turner Construction as the Main Contractor
• Curtainwall Design Consulting in charge of Facade Consultancy
• Thomas Properties Group as the Main Developer
• Frank Stella as the collaborating Artist

The Gas Company Tower can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The Gas Company Tower was completed in 1991. By 1991 the Postmodernism movement was experiencing a transition. Critics argued that Postmodernism, initially a rebellious and innovative style, had become formulaic and commercialized, and so the trend started moving away from blending historical styles, irony, and playful ornamentation, and begun to give way to emerging architectural trends concerned with more present matters such as technology, ecology or sustainability.

The Gas Company Tower uses a frame structure made of steel columns and concrete slabs.

A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.

The facade uses a non-load bearing curtain wall system. This means the curtain wall modules are anchored to the building's structural frame, typically by being attached to the edge of the floor slabs. The curtain wall system connects to the slabs using brackets, anchors, and mullions, which transfer the loads imposed by wind and temperature changes, to the building's primary structural elements.

This setup allows the curtain wall to accommodate differential movement between the facade and the structural frame, such as thermal expansion, floor deflection, or sway from wind forces. This system's integration with the slab edges also allows for continuous insulation and weatherproofing layers.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a curtain wall organized in 8 bays on the long side, with gray spandrels marking each floor. On the short side the curtain wall turns more opaque, with parts made of dark-gray opaque glass that create a regular grid of windows.

The tower's volume is defined by a sequence of cliff-like setbacks and inverted corners, culminating in an elliptical crown made of blue glass that symbolizes the iconic blue flame of its primary tenant, the gas company.