Westin Bonaventure Hotel

The Westin Bonaventure Hotel is a tall glass hotel in downtown Los Angeles, California. It was built between 1974 and 1977 and designed by the architect John C. Portman Jr. The building is about 112 metres tall and has 33 storeys, although the floor numbers go up to 35, because it has no floors numbered 7 or 13.

The top floor holds a revolving restaurant and bar, which slowly turns so guests can see the city. The hotel is famous for its outside glass elevators and its huge indoor spaces, which make it feel like a small city under one roof. Movies love it: bronze plaques at the hotel mark elevator scenes from three films, In the Line of Fire, True Lies, and Forget Paris.

Why is it so confusing to walk around?

Scholars have written that the hotel tries to be a whole world, a miniature city. Visitors, though, often got lost in it. The hotel has four elevator groups with twelve cars in all, named by colors and shapes: Red Circle, Yellow Diamond, Green Square, and Blue Triangle. Only the Red Circle one goes all the way to the top floor, while the other three stop at 32. The color-coded signs were added later, because guests found the layout hard to follow.

Where have you seen it?

The hotel has appeared in many movies and television shows. The plaques at the hotel remember elevator scenes in In the Line of Fire (1993), True Lies (1993), and Forget Paris (1994). Because the glass elevators run along the outside of the building, they make a dramatic place to film. Its architect, John Portman, and the hotel itself have also been the subject of several documentaries and school studies about city design.

On the globe

The model shows five cylindrical towers covered in bronze mirror glass, clustered on a concrete base, with glass elevators on the outside.