The glass MGM Tower is a 35-story high-rise office building located in Century City, one of the premier office locations in Los Angeles. Designed by Johnson Fain, the building encompasses approximately 704,000 square feet of office space with a large parking structure. This was the first Los Angeles skyscraper to be built in the twenty-first century.
The MGM Tower has minimal outdoor space, with the majority of the site dedicated to parking. ML+A added a border of deciduous trees to mitigate sound and soften the hard lines of the building’s steel and glass structure. In the arrival plaza, plant beds were integrated, which correspond with the geometric paving pattern.
A central courtyard for employees connecting to the parking structure is lined on either side with an undulating concrete raised planter and a continuous steel bench. The raised beds, which defines the back of the bench, included trees that provides shade as they mature. The area is popular among MGM Tower employees as it provides an outdoor area away from the noisy street. The firm also proposed mitigating trees at significant intersections as gateways to the Century City vicinity. The landscape establishes scale and balance, softening the hard edges of the buildings steel and concrete.
