The Gas Company Tower on Bunker Hill in Los Angeles is actually one of the more interesting skyscrapers in Downtown, home to a mostly indifferent skyline of Modernist and Po-Mo high-rises.

Designed by Richard Keating of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, rising 52 stories, it’s topped by an homage to the Gas Co.’s trademark blue flame, a cutout through its top floors that also looks like an ovaloid Alvar Aalto glass flower vase. It was completed in 1991 as the second tower that innovative developer Robert Maguire, who helped transform Downtown, was able to erect by buying air rights from the Central Library, whose restoration and expansion — and creation of new open space — he oversaw.

Needing office space, the County of Los Angeles bought the building after the tower’s owner defaulted in 2023,

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