Is the new Wilshire Grand Center in L.A. taller than the Stratosphere?

Hey, what's all this about the Wilshire being the tallest building west of the Mississippi? I thought the Stratosphere Tower was.

Our 6/28/17 QoD on whatever happened to the Elvis-A-Rama Museum mentioned that the Stratosphere Towers is “the tallest structure west of the Mississippi.” We received contentions from several readers, including Annie who left a comment on that page, about the new Wilshire Grand Center in downtown Los Angeles, which opened on this past June 23.

All the stories we’ve read about the Wilshire Grand claim that it’s the tallest building in the west, but to borrow a phrase from Bill Clinton, it all depends on the meaning of the word “building,” and the word “tall” (and the word “is”; just kidding).

According to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), to qualify as a “building,” it must have floors continuously from ground level; CTBUH defines a building as “designed for residential, business, or manufacturing” purposes.

Obviously, the Wilshire Grand qualifies, as it has 73 floors of retail, office, and hotel-room space, though to get nitpicky, the “building” itself is 804 feet tall, while the spire is just under 295 feet, so technically it’s nowhere near a 1,099-foot "building."

Of course, these distinctions are mostly rhetorical, though it’s certainly accurate to say that the Stratosphere (along with the CN Tower in Toronto, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and the tallest of them all by a long shot, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai) are towers or structures and not buildings.

And we did just that in our QoD, calling Stratosphere a "structure," which at 1,149 feet is 50 foot taller than Wilshire.

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Deke Castleman Jul-31-2017

corrections

Our ace correspondent AlontheNet wrote in with the following new facts. 

First, the height of the "building" part of the Wilshire skyscraper, from the plaza to the crown, is 934 feet, not 850 as stated in the answer; we based our estimate on the height from the plaza to the Sky Pool (830 feet). Another thing: the spire begins a couple floors below the top of the building. This is important for the math to add up, since the whole building is 1099 feet high, the top of the building is 934 feet high, and that the spire is 295 feet high. That would make the building 1,229 feet altogether, so the 130-foot difference is the overlap between the building and the spire.

Also, Burj Khalifa does qualify as a building, as it has floors -- 163 of them, in fact. Al reminds us of the Mission Impossible movie filmed there, which went thoroughly inside and outside the building, showing the many rooms on the floors and elevators that are surrounded by rooms.

Thanks to Al for pointing out these

Question of the Day - 22 July 2017

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