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Eric Owen Moss Architects have completed the construction of The (W)rapper, an office tower in Los Angeles. What’s special about this structure is it is wrapped by continuous steel bands. An ongoing 35-year regeneration plan for a former industrial and manufacturing zone between Central Los Angeles and Culver City, California, United States, included this 272 m office building. The 17 story deconstructivist tower in Los Angeles’ Culver City community won construction approval in 2017 and began. The tower’s expressive structural design imposes its own language on the steel bands that are supported by an isolated base.
This base creates a barrier between the tower structure above and the seismic isolator foundations below. This allows the building to move and respond to seismic events securely and safely. Furthermore, when compared to typical high rise structural systems, which are based on columns arranged along modular grid lines, Moss’s design is unique. A network of curvilinear bands emanating from several geometric centre points provides all of the support for the (W)rapper. Moreover, the office levels in the tower, with floor to floor heights ranging from 4,11 meters to 7,31 meters. The 7,31 meter floor features a mezzanine suspended from the ceiling above.
More on The (W)rapper and Eric Owen Moss Architects
In 1998, Eric Owen Moss, an honorary member of the World Architecture Community, presented his initial idea during an exhibition at the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio. Only one other high rise commercial office building—Wrapper—uses such a base-isolated structure in the United States. The mostly rectilinear building envelope is encircled by each curved band. It is then folded around the building’s vertical and horizontal corners until it reaches the ground. A significant earthquake won’t destroy this tower, and its residents will be back at work the next day. Other high rise structures facing comparable seismic issues will suffer major damage and may need to be removed or completely rebuilt before being occupied again, the studio predicted. |
