One Santa Fe is just six stories tall, around the same height as the vast majority of new apartment buildings in Los Angeles, since by code going any higher requires trading wood for a more expensive steel or concrete frame. But it is a quarter-mile long — wider than the Empire State Building is high — and holds 510,000 square feet of interior space.

It is this combination that makes One Santa Fe's significance impossible to miss. The design takes banality and stretches it like taffy in the direction of monumentality.

It uses those 438 apartments to fill a pair of long train-like wings, which is fitting given that along its eastern flank the complex backs up to a rail yard and the concrete banks of the L.A. River. It makes the famously linear campus of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, directly across the street to the west, look stubby.

One Santa Fe, with 20% of its units earmarked as affordable housing, has been a controversial building in the arts district since its construction began. Some have criticized it as wildly oversized or seen it as a kind of gentrification ocean liner, slowly drifting toward dock as an unmistakable symbol of the money pouring into this corner of downtown, which used to feel busy only when somebody was shooting a car commercial.

In fact the meaning of the project — and its appeal, if you're willing to look at it a certain way — springs directly from its practically Seussian width.

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