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.
— Los Angeles Times
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.
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.”
8 Comments
"The petition also called for the removal of the school’s history and theory coordinator, Marikka Trotter, an associate at Wiscombe’s firm (and who is also his girlfriend)."
LMAO someone finally said it.
I actually liked Giovanni's take on the LACMA. But he is a "curator" too - after all, who decides what is cool or not? Academics love writing about each other - they hold symposiums, exhibitions, lectures, and crits with each other to discuss each other. It could end up a closed loop of ideas - you scratch my back, I scratch your's. I reference your theoretical project in my essay for your magazine - you ask your student to look up my project for your studio.
To the extent that sometimes their written work does get published in the mainstream press, these cultural curators serve as gatekeepers to what is "cool". Philip Johnson was a very influential curator - if he selected you in one of his exhibitions, you gain a new American and even global audience.
But social media has blown that gatekeeping apart to a large degree. Now students could freely follow what they find cool on Instagram - Pinterest played this role before, and books/photos before that. There's still curation going on, as the algorithm overlords see fit. But it's a wider field than back when critics and academics are the main arbiters of what's cool or not.
So Giovanni, through his NYT pieces and books, think Wiscombe is cool and influential. Does anyone else outside Sci-Arc's closely-knit circle feel that way? Trotter writes essays about Wiscombe but that's really too close to home.
monosierra, what you wrote is so well said and captures the context as good as a photograph.
The fact that Sciarc has not fired this doofus yet says a lot about the current management there .(i.e. they are all complicit)
Indeed. Wiscombe and Trotter may be uniquely tone deaf, but everything he has been accused of seems to have been woven into SCI-Arc's culture since at least the post-Denari period.
Daniel Liebeskind had better watch out! Tom is really giving him some competition for spending clients' money on arbitrary, angled, metal-clad madness. The square billboard right across Sunset is much more interesting to me.
It's a nice summary of the controversy, but I think dismissing the form of the project is a missed opportunity. I think it's understood that the economy of design faculty boutique firms relies on a coercive environment (bolstered by their academic positions) to deliver their services simply because projects like this one are rare and typically under funded.
It's not discussed enough that projects like this one are rare because these firms simply do not have the capacity to deliver services for actual architecture. That the legitimacy of this man is protected in the name of a fucking billboard... it's more than depressing. The critic of the school and the boss and the profession should also be a critic of what these systems are producing. The delusion that this billboard has any architectural merit is integral to the delusion that working 18 hours will one day be repaid or that enduring mistreatment is unavoidable.
This isn't to say that if the project did have merit, these practices would be acceptable. Rather, it should be promoted that theoretical, challenging projects are not mutually exclusive with professional standards.
Not confident I've captured my thoughts very well here. All I can say is that to me, the form of the project is connected to how he functions as a professional and as a professor. It all stinks.
To clarify: when I say they don't have the capacity, I do mean that they're bad architects. Inexperienced, don't understand how buildings happen, and often don't care.
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