LOS ANGELES — Desolate much of America’s landscape, these billboards are the landscape itself along West Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. A dense linear forest of sizzling images promoting the hottest stars and the latest albums and movies. By the time a rush-hour motorist runs his two-mile gauntlet (partially digital) of these fascinating tapestries, they know who is who and what is what in America’s current culture. learning
For decades, this sunset-lined billboard has been a coveted status symbol for artists and studios. However, since the advent of smartphones, the widescreen cinematic format, which mirrors the screens of Hollywood feature films, has given way to vertical formats, which mirror smaller screens. in the palm of your hand.
But that transformation is now facing another change. It’s a high-rise, intricate high-tech structure brought to the Las Vegas Strip. Los Angeles architect Tom WiscombeInstead of steel pillars rigidly supporting billboards, avant-garde designers created irregularly shaped sloping vertical teepees programmed with digital art and advertising. All of them are specially designed for irregular screens.
Wiscom We took the usual billboard flat screen into the 3rd dimension and followed the first commandment of architecture: “Let’s have space.”
By streaming digital art and advertising into his angular structures, the 52-year-old designer renews the commandments and integrates what he calls our “brokered lives” into 3D environments. “Smartphones can start creating architecture and civic rooms in cities,” he says.
In 2016, the City of West Hollywood, known for its innovative urban design and planning, held the Sunset Spectacular Billboard Competition, inviting advertising firms to team up with architects to reinvent billboards. National park sequoias in the entertainment industry.
The competition brief assumed that the product would not simply replace older analog formats with digital. Designers have to guess: What can be included besides advertising? How can art be integrated? How does it serve West Hollywood-related events like the Pride Parade and wider civic purposes?
Competing advertising firms hired their own architects and designers, and Wiscom’s proposed “West Hollywood Bell Tower” orange barrel mediaBased in Columbus, Ohio.
Two months ago, after years of neighborhood meetings, approvals, and high-tech fabrication, the construction fence was finally removed and installed around Wiscom’s towering $14 million building. The building is located on the Sunset bend of Holloway Drive at the end of a new powered car park. A station and a small public square designed for markets and events.
“The first thing I wanted to do was create a sign that included the indoor space,” says Wiscombe, who also designed the car park. “I increased the regular billboards and decided to basically have three vertical sides leaning against each other. An internal superstructure connects them, like the vaults of a Gothic cathedral. If you look up, you can see all this interconnected structure.”
Like a performance stage, Wiscombe’s fascinating chapel contains digital and mechanical elements such as data conduits, water cooling systems, computer-controlled electric lighting, video projectors, and an interactive audio system that enlivens the space with moving colored projections. Infrastructure is packed. Especially bright after dark.
Billboards in America were invented long ago to be visible from cars, and in Hollywood versions sometimes served as an elevated stage for the cast to act out scenes from the movie. , Sunset billboards continue to celebrate pop culture at some of the highest profile venues in the entertainment industry.” pete scantland Founder and CEO of Orange Barrel Media.
Blending architecture, art, media and an interactive pedestrian experience, Wiscombe’s designs transform the usual ‘stick sign’. Once out of the car, people can now walk through a theater capsule of Kinetic his image that lights up an overhead iron plate on their way to Sunset Boulevard. Tourists spill from buses to stroll in and around the city’s towering new destinations, immersed in streaming digital images projected onto outdoor LED screens and right-angle architectural storms indoors.
“Art, architecture and civic space are all intertwined,” Wiscombe said.
An angled tower stages and frames the show. The internal overhead scaffolding is not an ordinary steel frame with traditional I-beams, but an intricate web of custom-perforated, laser-cut steel plates, welded together with a giant cubic jigsaw, with an outer face It is stabbed at an oblique angle, leaving a distortion. , there were exceptional fingerprints around the LED signage facing the street.
The irregular shape of screens forces advertisers to create unique ads rather than one-size-fits-all images to fit billboards, which are becoming more standardized. “The format and prominence of this place will inspire advertisers to step up their game to create something of their own,” says West, who now has other innovative architects on the Hollywood Strip. Says Scantland, who sponsors Billboard.
Amazon Music, Chanel, and Meta all recently created ads offering sales pitches that graphic punches can digest at 35 mph. However, for 10 minutes every hour, digital art by renowned local and international artists plays on his two screens, presenting an astonishing display. Because they don’t sell products.Selected by independent art curators based in Los Angeles Diana Nawi The video contains a vintage shot of a group of surfers bobbing on their boards (Catherine Opie(Pipilotti list). Artists can take over the signs and chapels and “play” like carillon makers playing the carillon. In addition to a radical transformation of billboard design, art for the sake of art sets Sunset Spectacular apart from all billboards on the Strip.
Wiscombe’s Mechano Tower, similar to Transformers, could be a robot from a science fiction movie. “Construction has always been a cottage industry, with lots of rods, panels and pieces of stone being transported to construction sites,” he says. His project portfolio is inspired by aerospace and naval engineering. “This design sits somewhere between a building prototype and an aerospace prototype. If it opens, it’s also a pilot his project for him to build into the 21st century.”
As Billboard, the Wiscombe building exchanged photographs taken from the film in exchange for an immersive cinematic experience. Pedestrians became actors walking through a scene translating images into walk-in, walk-through reality. you are there