Henry N. Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed designed the tower with a specific geological reality in mind: downtown Los Angeles sits above multiple fault systems, and any building reaching this height would need to survive the kind of earthquake that the region periodically produces. The structure was engineered to withstand a magnitude 8.3 earthquake — a specification that shaped decisions from the depth of the foundation to the way the steel frame was connected.

The $350 million construction project was completed in 1989, and the building immediately became the anchor of the downtown skyline. Its cylindrical shape, stepping back toward the top, was designed partly for aesthetic reasons and partly to reduce wind loads at altitude. The crown — a circular observation deck surrounded by steel arches — gives the building its immediately recognizable silhouette, visible from aircraft approaching Los Angeles from nearly any direction.

When the tower opened, its rooftop helipad was the highest in the world. From 1989 to 2004, no building anywhere had a functional helipad at a greater elevation. The distinction sounds exotic, but it served practical purposes in a city where helicopter traffic is a normal feature of the transportation landscape — news helicopters, law enforcement, emergency medical services. The ability to land at the summit of the tallest building in the western United States was an operational capability as much as a prestige feature.

The informal name the building carried for years — Library Tower, because its development displaced the proposed expansion of the Los Angeles Central Library — reflects the city's tendency to humanize its monumental structures with stories of what they replaced or what almost happened instead.

The tower's height and prominence made it a target in ways that went beyond fictional destruction. The 9/11 Commission Report documented that the building had been among the targets discussed by al-Qaeda in the planning stages of the September 11 attacks, though it was not ultimately included in the executed plot. A second, more fully developed plan emerged in 2002: a scheme to crash aircraft into the building was disrupted through intelligence operations, the details of which remained classified for years before being publicly disclosed by the Bush administration in 2007.

The building's tenants and management continued ordinary operations through these disclosures. The knowledge that a specific building has been selected as a target by people willing to die to destroy it is a particular kind of information — alarming in the abstract, manageable in the daily rhythms of office life. The tower did not close. People worked. The helipad continued to receive traffic. The building remained the tallest thing in the western sky.

The filmography attached to the tower is extensive enough to constitute its own cultural artifact. Independence Day used the building as the site of a spectacular alien strike, with the destruction sequence becoming one of the most replicated images of 1990s disaster cinema. The Day After Tomorrow froze it inside a climate catastrophe. San Andreas toppled it in an earthquake that, unlike the actual engineering of the building, did not take fault survival seriously.

In the Grand Theft Auto franchise, the fictional Maze Bank Tower — modeled closely on the US Bank Tower — has been a fixture for millions of players who have destroyed, climbed, jumped from, and otherwise interacted with it in virtual Los Angeles. The building has thus been simultaneously a real structure housing real tenants, a target of real terrorist planning, and a repeatedly destroyed symbol in both cinema and interactive media. No other building in Los Angeles carries quite that combination.