Archinect - News

The Sunset Strip may get a mini Las Vegas Sphere-ish display

2023-11-09T17:45:00-05:00

A new spherical LED billboard display appears ready to grace Los Angeles’ Sunset Boulevard as planners are preparing to review a developer proposal for "The Sphere on Sunset" entertainment venue in West Hollywood.

Urbanize LA was first to report on the Las Vegas Sphere-like structure before it goes up for review in front of the West Hollywood Planning Commission's Design Review Subcommittee today (November 9).

The project would culminate at 8410 Sunset Boulevard. Its brief calls for the demolition of an existing café at the site, an outdoor video display, and construction of a 49-foot wide sphere and a 2,460-square-foot building to be used partially for podcast production. A new 2,400-square-foot pedestrian plaza and 1,350-square-foot roof terrace/viewing platform will be enacted as well. Los Angeles’ SAEE Studio is listed as the architect.

Image courtesy SAEE Studio

The project hopes to follow in the 516-foot-wide footsteps of the wildly successful Las Vegas Sphere, which has drawn...

Carolina A. Miranda thinks Tom Wiscombe's new billboard should prompt a 'reckoning in architecture'

2022-08-25T17:09:00-04:00

Formally known as the Sunset Spectacular, it consists of a trio of massive steel panels that converge at a height of 67 feet, two of their surfaces draped in irregularly shaped digital screens bearing ads for tech overlords Amazon and Meta. If a game designer for “Halo” were to imagine a billboard, this is probably what it would look like. [...] There is an important story embedded in the design of the Sunset Spectacular. It has nothing to do with its forms.

Responding to the New York Times’ recent “puff piece” on embattled SCI-Arc professor Tom Wiscombe’s long-awaited Sunset Spectacular billboard in West Hollywood, critic Carolina A. Miranda offered a rather cutting take on Joseph Giovannini‘s “extra curious” failure to mention what has become a rather viral academic and professional controversy.

Previously on Archinect: Controversy at SCI-Arc over labor practices leads to faculty members placed on leave. Isolated incident or a wake-up call for the industry at large?

Wiscombe was the centerpiece of the recent investigation into student intern labor abuse at SCI-Arc and has been placed on administrative leave as a result of his alleged actions. “To many skeptics, it seemed as if the architectural establishment were intent on scrubbing the record clean,” Miranda wrote, citing the chorus of derision that has swelled on social media. “This whole episode also calls into question how critics (myself included) write about architecture.”

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#SailsNotSales: public protests after Sydney Opera House displays horse racing ad on its facade

2018-10-15T16:13:00-04:00

After a horse race ad was projected onto the structure’s iconic roof earlier this week, protestors took to the streets in objection to the commodification of their beloved building.

Hundreds of protesters had gathered in the evening hours of October 9 when the, usually, off-white iconic sails of the Sydney Opera House were used as a video projection canvas to promote a major upcoming horse race in New South Wales. The crowd booed and tried to interrupt the projection with a small army of flash lights, chanting "Whose house? Our house".

The protest meanwhile has drawn much wider circles, resulting in a Change.org petition with over 300,000 supporters against any future use of the UNESCO World Heritage Site as a promotional billboard and a rebuke from the Heritage Council of NSW.

Toronto residents use political art to push for “Gentrification Tax” to keep neighborhoods affordable

2018-08-22T15:42:00-04:00

The billboard suggested the rapid rise in home values between 2008 and 2017 necessitates a steep tax aimed at speculative flipping. The proposed tax would grab as much as 100 per cent of the profit from a home resale during the first year of ownership, then decline by increments of 10 per cent over 10 years. It would target non-resident and resident buyers alike, including primary residences [...] the goal is to keep Toronto’s popular neighbourhoods affordable for all income levels.