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The forest of steel and glass in Downtown Los Angeles includes many distinctive modern buildings. But I’m going to focus on two architectural superlatives: the tallest skyscraper and the largest hotel. (Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Los Angeles Central Library can probably share the superlative of “most interesting building,” so they each get their own pages.)

The U.S. Bank Tower (also called the Library Tower) is the tallest building in Los Angeles. At 310.3 meters— 75 stories, if you count the two underground parking levels— it’s also the tallest in California, the tallest west of the Mississippi River, and even the tallest structure between Chicago and Hong Kong.

The tower has other world-class superlatives. It has the world’s highest helicopter landing pad (the Los Angeles building code require helipads on all skyscrapers, for evacuation in an emergency), and the world’s highest corporate logo sign.

When it was built built it was the tallest building in a seismically-active location. It’s engineered to withstand an earthquake of magnitude 8.3 on the Richter scale. That’s larger than any “Big One” the infamous San Andreas Fault has been known to unleash; but the tower should also prevail against anything the spaghetti-tangle of smaller faults under the Los Angeles Basin might produce. But of course, Mother Nature sometimes manages to exceed even the most extreme predictions of scientists and engineers, as she amply demonstrated in Japan.

New York architect Henry N. Cobb designed a postmodern interpretation of a classical Greco-Roman column, with a distinctive glass “crown” as the capital. The crown is illuminated at night, in colors that change to commemorate holidays or special events.

The building has had three names since it opened at the end of 1989. It was originally called the Library Tower. The historic Los Angeles Central Library, directly across the street, suffered severe damage from two arson fires in 1986. To fund its costly restoration, city officials sold the Library’s air rights to a consortium of developers. Those rights provided an exemption from restrictions on building height, clearing the way to begin construction of the skyscraper in 1987.

In 1990, First Interstate Bancorp leased enough space in the tower to earn naming rights for the building. Naturally, they renamed it “First Interstate Bank World Center.” Then they installed a sign on the crown with the First Interstate logo, which earned a place in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s highest corporate logo. The sign also earned much of criticism of the damage it did to the building’s aesthetics.

That name (and sign) lasted until 1996, when Wells Fargo bought First Interstate Bancorp and ended both the agreement and the First Interstate name. (Wells Fargo has its own tower nearby.) The official name changed back to the Library Tower until 2003, when U.S. Bank leased enough of the building to again claim naming rights. Thus the current official name— and a new sign that reclaimed both the record and the criticism. But local people still call it the Library Tower. They probably have the right idea, given the apparent transience of banks and their naming rights.

To answer a common question, the Library Tower was designed with neither an observation deck nor any other provision for the general public to enjoy the view. I don’t know whether this was an oversight, or an intentional ploy to preserve the building as an exclusive sanctum for the High-Powered People who do their Important Business in it.

But anyone can peek into the tower’s lobby, walk around the glass columns at the entrance to the building, and even take advantage of the shade provided by John Neary’s 1990 installation, Sails.

Also freely accessible to the public are the Bunker Hill Steps on the northwest side of the Library Tower. They’re the work of landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, who also designed the Central Library’s Maguire Gardens across the street. They’re sometimes called the Spanish Steps. That’s not because of the many Spanish-speaking people in Los Angeles, but because Halprin was supposedly inspired by the Spanish Steps in Rome. If that’s true, they’re a lot cleaner than what I remember of the Roman version.

A fountain at the top of the Bunker Hill Steps sends water cascading down a series of waterfalls in the center of the steps. In the fountain, a naturalistic sculpture of an African-American woman stands on a column atop a pedestal. Her face is serene, and her hands are cupped in a gesture of welcome to people climbing the 103 steps (although most of them miss the greeting because they ride the escalators alongside the stairs).

The sculpture’s official title is Source Figure, referring to the fountain as the source of the waterfall. Because the base of the pedestal on which the sculpture stands in the fountain inexplicably includes three sculpted crabs brandishing their claws, the sculpture is unofficially called “Woman With Crabs.” Source Figure is the work of Robert Graham, a sculptor perhaps best known in Los Angeles for the controversial gateway he added to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for the 1984 Olympics, which features two headless torsos of male and female athletes.

At the bottom of the Bunker Hill steps, in the wall separating it from the adjacent Citigroup Center, is an enigmatic concrete installation. It’s enigmatic because I haven’t been able to find any information about it. It’s not even mentioned in Ruth Wallach’s comprehensive Public Art in Los Angeles Web site, which offers detailed information about the other art around the Bunker Hill Steps.

If you walk northwest on Fifth Street from the Library Tower for a block and turn right, you might think you’ve stumbled into a matte background painting from a twentieth century science fiction movie. Four mirrored glass cylinders cluster around a central core, with smaller glass cylinders occasionally scurrying up and down the white concrete gantries attached to the central core. Is it a giant alien spacecraft? Or perhaps an arcology that safely isolates its residents from the toxic environment of the 21st century?

It’s neither. Officially labeled “The Westin Bonaventure Hotel and Shopping Gallery,” it’s usually called just “the Bonaventure.” It’s the largest hotel in Los Angeles: 35 stories and 112 meters high, with 1,354 rooms and 135 suites, and occupying an entire city block. Since it opened in 1976 the Bonaventure has been featured in a diverse assortment of movies and television shows, not all of which are science fiction.

The Bonaventure is the work of John C. Portman, Jr. He is renowned as both an architect and a real estate developer, and served in both capacities for the Bonaventure. The hotel’s “rosette” design concept— a circle of towers surrounding a central tower— is one of Portman’s distinctive trademarks. He used a similar layout for Detroit’s Renaissance Plaza and Atlanta’s Peachtree Plaza.

Portman’s best-known architectural innovation is the cavernous multi-story atrium at the center of a high-rise hotel. The Bonaventure’s atrium is six stories high, but the transparent glass ceiling offers a view of the sky and towers, making it feel much larger. (I wonder if Portman might have been inspired, at least subconsciously, by the Bradbury Building, also in Downtown Los Angeles. Designed in 1892, it’s notable for a five-story central atrium illuminated by a skylight ceiling.) In addition to a hotel lobby, the Bonaventure’s atrium is a shopping mall, with a collection of shops, restaurants, and a fast-food court on its upper levels.

Four glass cylindrical elevators— one for each tower— rise out of the atrium, past the glass ceiling to the outside of the central core. A ride in an elevator offers both an outward-looking view of Los Angeles and a fractured view reflected in the windows of the adjacent tower cylinder.

If the Bonaventure’s exterior realizes Portman’s vision of a glistening future, its interior presents a contrasting dystopian vision. The atrium is filled with stark, sterile, imposing spirals and pillars of bare concrete, with strange oval “pods” (some of which contain gym equipment). It’s anything but friendly and welcoming. The meandering spiral walkways, combined with the look-alike symmetry of elevators and cylinders, create an uncomfortable sense of disorientation. It’s difficult to maintain your bearings, and to know what direction you’re facing or which level you’re on.

If your left your rose-colored glasses at home, you might marvel at Portman’s prescience in predicting a future where people are increasingly isolated, disoriented, and dwarfed by forces larger than the human scale. And looking at the concrete fortress bunker that separates the glass and steel rosette from the street, you might suspect that Portman somehow knew back in the 1970s that the 21st century would be the Age of Terror.

A visit to the Bonaventure is an opportunity to experience and reflect on a fascinating work of modern art, however you perceive it.

The fine print: Pictures and text are copyright © 2010 and 2011 by Ted R. Marcus and may not be reproduced without permission. For information about licensing any of these images for Web, print, stock, or other uses, contact me.