Los Angeles City Hall

Los Angeles City Hall rises above the downtown skyline as a twenty-eight story tower capped by a distinctive wedding cake pyramid. Completed in nineteen twenty-eight, the building was the first to break the city's strict height limit that had existed for decades. Construction crews used sand from every one of California's fifty-eight counties and water from the state's twenty-one historical missions to mix the concrete. It remains the tallest base-isolated structure in the world, engineered to withstand massive earthquakes.