Olympic Tower
Year 2024 | Downtown Los Angeles, California
Located at one of the most prominent and visible corners of Downtown Los Angeles, Olympic Tower will host a variety of uses, including retail, offices, hotels, and condominiums, all thoughtfully integrated into the existing urban environment. Conceived along Olympic Boulevard, the project is envisioned as a metaphorical "bent salutation" to the Entertainment District (featuring LA Live, Crypto Arena, Nokia Center, etc.), while incorporating a south-facing, elevated open atrium landscaped at the condominium amenities and hotel levels.
The 58-story iconic building is designed as a monumental urban tree (with vertical gardens integrated into a kaleidoscope-like landmark), where real vegetation is combined with digitized landscapes and graphic art images, growing along its structural grid enclosed within double glass surfaces.
The 57 story iconic building and its 5 levels of underground parking has been conceived as a metaphorical "bent salutation" to the Los Angeles Downtown's Entertainment area (LA Live, Crypto Arena, Peacock Theatre, etc.) while creating, as a monumental urban tree (as a true vertical garden landmark), a South facing landscaped elevated open atriums. These spaces are connecting the surrounding urban landscape with the hotel outdoor upper lobby and the condomunium amenities, establishing a synergetic connection between the private and the public realm.
The structural component is part of the architectural expression, wrapping the building around its entire perimeter, eliminating interior columns at the free standing tower and culminating at the rooftop with a structural trellis tying the vertical structural grid. The building design recognizes its adjacency to the Historic Figueroa Hotel by detaching the tower above the hotel roof level, and the Olympic Tower Figueroa Street’s facade is designed in more sensitive scale, addressing the first levels of the tower to be more compatible to the scale of the hotel architecture lower levels. Given that Olympic Tower is a multi-use complex the building is dealing with several independent vertical circulations connecting the ground floor (City street level) with upper lobbies and amenity floors.
At the street level the project is pedestrian friendly, utilizing the side alley to provide all the vehicular access to the different functions and levels while maintaining the sidewalks and parkways along Figueroa Street and Olympic Boulevard for the exclusive uses of pedestrian traffic. The Retail ground level and upper two floors are designed to encourage the flowing connection to the pedestrian traffic by weaving its storefronts and accesses into the main lobbies.
