Turning the Billboard into Sculpture: the 64-Foot Sunset Spectacular in West Hollywood

Drive west along Sunset Boulevard and, somewhere in the procession of billboards, a single piece of architecture is standing. Not a rectangular hoarding perched on a pole. A mass like a tilted crystal, rising out of the ground. Video runs across its surface; a plaza lies at its feet. This is 8775 Sunset Blvd, on Hollywood's Sunset Strip. It goes by the name Sunset Spectacular.

A billboard is ordinarily made of two parts: the structure that holds it up, and the surface that does the showing. The support is not to be looked at, and what deserves looking at is the face — that is the tacit agreement. The Sunset Spectacular breaks it. Instead of separating structure from surface, it makes the apparatus as a whole into a single sculpture. Sixty-four feet high, roughly 19.5 metres. What this article takes up is the physical singularity of the vessel that houses the screen.

Doubting the Sign-on-a-Stick — Competition and Design

The Sunset Spectacular came out of a juried design competition. In 2016 the City of West Hollywood put out an open call for the design of a new billboard on a corner of the Sunset Strip. The entrants were architects of international standing; Zaha Hadid and Gensler were among the names on the list. What the city finally selected was the team of Orange Barrel Media (OBM) and the Los Angeles–based Tom Wiscombe Architecture.

The design argument Wiscombe put forward contained an explicit criticism of the billboard as it exists. He set out to break with the "sign-on-a-stick" — the type that is nothing more than a hoarding set on a pole. What he referenced instead were the civic archetypes of the city: the bell tower, the clock tower. He sought to raise the billboard from an advertising device one merely passes into an architectural presence that occupies a position within the street. It was also conceived as a double existence: standing on the physical Sunset Strip and, at the same time, forming an image inside social media.

Its form, according to the description in the practice's official portfolio, is made of four enormous parts: three outer shell faces and, nested inside them, a tilted "tesseract". A tesseract is the projection of a four-dimensional cube into three dimensions, and Wiscombe set this geometry at the core of the architecture. The whole is not an accumulation of human-scale members but is divided into masses like oversized puzzle pieces — "chunks", in his word. That division allows the thing to be stacked and assembled with little human labour. At its feet the ground curls up "like a magic carpet", marking out a small nested world within the city.

The competition was announced in 2016, construction began in 2019, and the tower was completed in 2021. Five years passed before the crystal rose out of the ground.

Advertising Flows Back to the Public — A Public-Private Partnership

The Sunset Spectacular opened in May 2021. The undertaking is not OBM's alone. It was developed as a public-private partnership with the City of West Hollywood, and here lies another of the apparatus's singularities.

The Sunset Strip is the sacred ground of Hollywood's billboard culture. There, the right to erect a new digital billboard had been frozen for more than a decade. The Sunset Spectacular is the first new digital OOH on the Strip in over ten years, realised by lifting that freeze. Thawing the right was not a simple piece of deregulation. It was designed as an exchange for civic value. In return for permitting the new billboard, the city receives the revenue that comes from it. And the city reinvests that revenue in the cultural and creative community of Los Angeles. An advertising tower has been made into a mechanism that feeds the culture of the street.

Wiscombe himself has put this design thinking succinctly.

Sometimes we think of media as being attached to buildings, and in this case, we're going to great lengths to integrate the media into a kind of overall civic experience.

— Orange Barrel Media — Sunset Spectacularsource

Media is something "attached" to buildings — that is the habitual assumption, but here the intent runs the other way, toward integrating media into a civic experience taken as a whole. The "civic experience" Wiscombe names resonates with the bell-tower and clock-tower archetypes he cited. Towers once announced the time of a town and gathered people into the square. The Sunset Spectacular attempts to replace the functions of that civic tower in the present, by way of video, advertising and a plaza. The apparatus has two full-motion digital displays facing east and west, an interior volume activated by cultural programming, and a multi-purpose public plaza at its base. It is a billboard and, at the same time, a place to gather.

Nick Cave on the Same Screen — Arts on Sunset

At the heart of the apparatus is a continuing public-art project named Arts on Sunset. It was developed by OBM, and the curation is handled by Diana Nawi, an independent curator based in Los Angeles. Nawi is a former co-artistic director of Prospect.5 New Orleans, a curator of contemporary art by profession. The art slot of an advertising tower, edited by a specialist curator — that arrangement in itself defines the character of the Sunset Spectacular.

The roster of artists commissioned in the launch period shows how serious the intention is. The Propeller Group. Nick Cave, who debuted in the late spring of 2021. Pipilotti Rist contributed a new work timed to her large survey exhibition at MOCA. Catherine Opie and Cauleen Smith both debuted in the autumn of 2021. All of them are contemporary artists working internationally. Their moving images run on the east- and west-facing displays.

What matters is that these artworks share the same screens as advertising. The displays of the Sunset Spectacular hold time for advertising and time for art along a single time axis. Revenue from the advertising slots returns to the city, and on those same faces Nick Cave and Pipilotti Rist appear. This double programming of advertising and art was built in from the design stage — from the moment of the competition proposal. It is not a one-off art project but a permanent programming model, an "art slot on an advertising tower". Time for art has been secured in advance inside the commercial infrastructure of the city.

The Billboard as Vessel — An Editorial View and Outlook

Look at how the apparatus was built and it becomes clear that Wiscombe's argument is no fantasy. The record filmed by BESCO Bauer, the electrical contractor involved in the construction, captures members like oversized puzzle pieces being assembled, little by little, into the sky over the Sunset Strip. Rather than piling up countless small human-scale components, chunks — masses — are hoisted and fitted into place. The logic of that assembly runs consistently from the geometric core of the tesseract through to each single move on the construction site. A billboard that is a sculpture has a process that is sculptural too.

What the Sunset Spectacular demonstrates is a lineage in which the vessel of the billboard is made sculptural. The screen is ordinarily severed from the structure that supports it, and the structure is required to be transparent. Wiscombe refused that separation and recast the thing that supports and the thing that shows as a single mass. The sign on a stick is replaced by a tilted crystal. Against the scenery of the street, this substitution makes a decisive difference. The support that ought to be invisible becomes architecture meant to be seen, and the surface one merely passes gains, at its feet, a plaza where one stops.

And this vessel holds an emptied stretch of time. Between one advertisement and the next, time for art is kindled. This structure — inserting a permanent art slot into the valley of commercial infrastructure — is a device for kindling small appearances of meaning within the scenery of the city. The vessel first opens up a place and a time, and into that opened place the work a curator has assembled rises as tenkei, a point in the landscape. Within the sea of billboards that is the Sunset Strip, the Sunset Spectacular stands as one point that is a billboard and yet is trying to step outside the billboard. To turn an advertising tower into sculpture is to question the vessel itself, and beyond that questioning a place is prepared for the small appearances that bring a street to life.

Sources

1. fig.001Building Americas Coolest Billboard! The Sunset Spectacular — BESCO Bauer Electric Services(YouTube)
2. [2]Sunset Spectacular — Orange Barrel Media
3. [3]SUNSET SPECTACULAR — Tom Wiscombe Architecture
4. [4]Tom Wiscombe Architecture Wins Sunset Spectacular Billboard Competition — ArchDaily(2016)
5. [5]Orange Barrel Media and The City of West Hollywood Launch The Sunset Spectacular — OOH TODAY

Operations Record

OPERATOR

Orange Barrel Media with the City of West Hollywood, as a public-private partnership

LOCATION

West Hollywood

MODEL

Operator commission — Ad revenue flows back to the city for cultural reinvestment; the Arts on Sunset programme is developed by OBM and curated by Diana Nawi

CADENCE

Permanent, with advertising and art sharing the same screens along the time axis

SPEC

A 64 ft (c. 19.5 m) sculptural tower by Tom Wiscombe Architecture: two full-motion LED faces east and west, an interior volume and a public plaza at the base

SINCE

2021

STATUS

Active

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