Westin Bonaventure Hotel

The Westin Bonaventure Hotel is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by John C. Portman Jr., and built between 1974 and 1976 in Los Angeles, CA.

Its precise street address is 404 South Figueroa Street, Los Angeles, CA. You can also find it on the map here.

The building is, in many ways, a self-contained city. Organized by gardened atriums and glass elevators, the building does not only contain hotel rooms, but also shops, hair salons, restaurants, convention halls, a gym with an indoor jogging track, an outdoor pool... and more.

On the 35th floor of the central tower, there is a revolving cocktail lounge that provides 360º panoramic views of Los Angeles.

John C. Portman Jr. 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 at the very least we know that there was one other part involved, that was in charge of Structural Engineering.

The Westin Bonaventure Hotel can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The Westin Bonaventure Hotel was completed in 1976. 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 Westin Bonaventure Hotel was therefore every much in line with what the architecture community, and the people liked and wanted at the time.

The Westin Bonaventure Hotel uses a frame structure made of steel columns and concrete and steel 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.

Two pedestrian bridges on the 2nd and 6th floors connect them to the surrounding buildings

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features dark mirrored glass for the 5 towers, which sit atop a six-story exposed concrete base.