Flamboyant South Park skyscraper moves ahead

By 2023, the car wash at the corner of Figueroa and Olympic could be replaced with a “kaleidoscopic” 58-story skyscraper.

That’s according to a new timeline in a newly released draft environmental impact report, which shows construction could begin as soon as 2020.

The tower would hold a handful of different uses, including a hotel and hundreds of condos.

Designed by Nardi Associates, the unique, grid-like exterior shell of the building is intended to invoke a kaleidoscope, and will incorporate plants, LED lights, and photovoltaic panels on its exterior “exoskeleton.”

On its website, Nardi says the tower was designed as a “monumental urban tree... where real vegetation is combined with digitized landscape and graphic art images.”

The first three floors of the high-rise would hold 65,074 square feet of commercial space. Above that would be office space, 373 hotel rooms, and 374 condos. On the 13th floor, the tower would have “a large, elevated, landscaped atrium.” The project would also hold six levels of underground parking

The carwash on the site now was long considered a hold-out in a neighborhood where new developments have been steadily proposed, taking out parking lots and shorter commercial buildings and replacing them with multi-building megaprojects.

The plan to redevelop this major corner site in South Park first emerged in late 2015—about a year after the longtime owner, Robert Bush, sold the site to developer Ben Neman for $25 million. Bush bought the property in 1980, paying $525,000.

• First Look at the Bonkers 60-Story Tower Planned For the Last Holdout in South Park [Curbed LA]
• Mapping South Park’s explosion of development [Curbed LA]