The construction of the 17-storey (W)rapper office tower in Los Angeles has been completed by Eric Owen Moss Architects.
This comes approximately 6 years since the implementation of the project began. The project, which is part of a 35-year regeneration plan for a former industrial and manufacturing zone between Central Los Angeles and Culver City, California, was approved in 2017.
The approval came close to two decades after plans for the project surfaced. In 1998, Eric Owen Moss, an honorary member of the World Architecture Community, presented his initial idea. This happened during an exhibition at the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio.
The (W)rapper office tower has floor-to-floor height offices ranging from 4,11 meters to 7,31 meters. The 7,31-meter offices feature a mezzanine suspended from the ceiling above.
Overview of (W)rapper office tower structural design
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.
As a result, the building can move and respond to seismic events securely and safely. Only one other high-rise commercial office building—Wrapper—uses such a base-isolated structure in the United States.
When compared to typical high-rise structural systems, which are based on columns arranged along modular grid lines, Moss’s design is unique.
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A network of curvilinear bands emanating from several geometric centre points provides all of the support for the (W)rapper. 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.
