Give you an example ~ you cannot suspend industrial machinery from above in CA no matter how strong the roof. You must install poles and support the machinery from the poles.
Talk about some U G L Y S T U F F (inside of course).
Exterior door access is another problem ~ that Beauvais cathedral could never have sufficient exit doors!
They can fake the appearance on one and two story buildings, but you go above something like 24 feet you are in the earthquake zone and it's gotta' be clunky with giant girders bolted at diagonals ~
I don’t understand why you keep referring to the Beauvais cathedral. No one is advocating trying to reconstruct a Gothic cathedral in LA.
Yes, we all, or most of us, have been to LA quite often. The building code is indeed restrictive. But note the criticisms of the LA cathedral: asymmetries, useless protrusions, coarse industrial exterior cladding, a very dated massing. Obviously the diagonal structural supports are an inconvenience but LA building code does not require doing everything in the ugliest manner possible. There are some very handsome tall office buildings there, including new construction. Buildings are ugly because the architects are imagination-free, not because the code requires ugliness.