Wells Fargo Tower

The Wells Fargo Tower is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and built between 1981 and 1983 in Los Angeles, CA.

Wells Fargo Tower 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 building has changed names several times over the years, and is also known as:

• Crocker Bank Center North between 1983 and 1986.
• Wells Fargo North Tower between 1986 and 0.
• Wells Fargo Center I.

Its precise street address is 333 S. Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA. You can also find it on the map here.

In 1986 the Wells Fargo Tower was awarded with the BOMA Office Building of the Year Award.

The Wells Fargo Tower is part of the Wells Fargo Center, together with the KPMG Tower to which it is connected by a three-story glass atrium. .

The building underwent a major restoration between 2018 and 2019. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill 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 Wells Fargo Tower a reality:

• Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in charge of Structural Engineering
• Turner Construction Company as the Main Contractor
• Thomas Properties Group as the Main Developer
• Lawrence Halprin in charge of Landscape Architecture
• Robert Graham as the collaborating Artist

The Wells Fargo Tower can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The Wells Fargo Tower was completed in 1983. At that time Postmodernism was the prevailing style. Fresh, bold and daring, architects were exploring the freedom of designing without having to follow the strict, sometimes arbitrary rules of a specific architectural movement (which ironically became a movement itself). The Wells Fargo Tower was therefore every much in line with what the architecture community, and the people liked and wanted at the time.

The Wells Fargo 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 of the building however, is load bearing. This doesn't imply that it is a traditional load-bearing wall. Rather, it means that the structure's exterior pillars have been pushed to the very edges, becoming integrated with the facade, and therefore, technically, a part of it.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a curtain wall made of glass and reddish-brown granite. The extensive use of marble on the facade is a clear departure form the international style, all-glass curtain walls that had been popularized in the decades prior for office buildings.

The tower stands on a parallelogram-shaped base, with acute angles.