Back in 2016, a unicorn landed on the counter of Los Angeles’s Department of Building and Safety, an unexpected, improbable, apparently fringe project that took new eyes to see. Architectural anomalies seldom make it past the door at the LADBS, but here was the 50-story Gateway, made up of stacked buildings with funky facades: twin 20-story residential towers rested on a big, 15-story hotel block, and they supported a block of luxury apartments above, itself surmounted by an architectural asteroid from a faraway galaxy.
Usually, high-rise buildings are cautious, well-behaved point towers straight out of Euclid that rise in a single leap from base to top, their facades as pin-striped as the suits of the bankers who finance them. This was not that.
Unusual circumstances produced this unusual submission. Designed by the Los Angeles office of Gensler Architects, it was one of several projects submitted by developers panicked by an impending legislative change that threatened to downzone, and devalue, their real estate in or near Downtown Los Angeles. The site of the unicorn, north of the Santa Monica and east of the Harbor Freeway, was loaded with potential, since the critical mass of a huge high-rise could redefine the area and create its own real estate value.
Scrambling to get in under the wire, before the downzoning passed, developers hired architects to create “placeholder” designs meant to win entitlements (the right to build). Architects quickly put together
