Los Angeles City Hall

Los Angeles City Hall rises in downtown Los Angeles, completed in 1928 through a collaboration of three architects, John C. Austin, John Parkinson and Albert C. Martin, who combined elements of Beaux-Arts, Byzantine and Romanesque Revival styles into a single stepped tower rising from a wide base. At the time of its completion, and reportedly under a special exemption from the city's own height restriction of the era, the tower's roughly 138-meter height made it the tallest building in Los Angeles, a distinction it held until the city's general height limit was lifted in the 1950s and 1960s. According to a widely repeated account, the concrete used in the tower's construction included sand gathered from each of California's 58 counties along with water drawn from its major rivers, a symbolic gesture tying the building to the entire state rather than the city alone. The tower's pyramidal, tiered crown, drawing loosely on the ancient Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, has appeared frequently in American film and television as a visual shorthand for Los Angeles city government, and the building underwent a major seismic retrofit completed in 2001 after suffering damage in the 1994 Northridge earthquake.