Gran Torre Costanera anchors the Costanera Center, a complex that also holds the largest shopping mall in Latin America, two hotels, and a pair of additional office towers. The skyscraper itself stands 300 metres tall with 64 floors above ground and six basement levels below. Pelli's Argentine-born studio led the design alongside the Chilean firm Alemparte Barreda & Asociados and Canada's Watt International. The structural engineering, the demanding part in a country that shakes, fell to the Chilean firm René Lagos y Asociados, whose work was vindicated when the building rode out major quakes during and after construction.

The tower nearly never finished. Construction began in 2006, but the global financial crisis froze the project in January 2009, leaving an unfinished concrete stump looming over Santiago, a stark monument to a recession reaching all the way to the Southern Cone. Work resumed on 17 December 2009. By late 2010 it had passed the neighboring Titanium La Portada to become the tallest in Chile, and on 14 February 2012 it reached its full height, claiming the record for Latin America. The building was completed in 2013, glass-clad and crowned with a latticed sculptural top.

On 11 August 2015, the tower opened its summit to the public. The observation deck, called Sky Costanera, occupies floors 61 and 62 and offers a full 360-degree panorama, the highest viewpoint in Latin America. The 61st floor is enclosed behind glass; the 62nd is an open-air terrace where the wind reminds you how high you stand. On a clear day the sightline runs from the snowcapped wall of the Andes in the east, across the dense gray sprawl of Santiago's basin, toward the coastal ranges that hide the Pacific beyond.

Not everyone welcomed it. Critics worried about a glass giant casting a mile-long shadow over a low-rise city, and the project drew its share of foreboding headlines as it rose. Yet the tower has settled into Santiago's identity the way landmarks tend to, becoming the backdrop of postcards and the meeting point everyone recognizes. Set against the permanence of the Andes, the gleaming shaft makes its own kind of statement: a city in the Southern Hemisphere, between mountains and sea, reaching deliberately for the sky.