Auld Lang Sign (Los Angeles Review of Architecture)
Look up Tim Street-Porter’s 1986 photograph Hills Above Sunset Strip—but only for a moment, or you might end up putting aside LARA for the day.
A lone, larger-than-life Marlboro Man—starkly cropped in, lasso in an outstretched hand—gallops across the shrubland of the Hollywood Hills West, his steed chafing at the weight of the company’s red-over-white serif logo. If it were lit, the cigarette in the wrangler’s mouth could conceivably set the splotchy, sepia slopes ablaze, imperiling the homes on the ridge behind the billboard. A thin line separates danger from bravura, however, and some of the dwellings, propped up on stilts and set atop improbable peaks, positively flaunt their precariousness. Foreground and background: Each confidently promises a lifestyle of glamorized risk and rugged individuation.
One lonesome cowboy notwithstanding, Street-Porter’s photo actually discloses very little about the Sunset Strip itself. An ambling fragment of Sunset Boulevard stretching less than two miles, the Strip has been swarming with advertisements of every imaginable size and shape—from static, hand-painted placards to outré displays of digitalia—for well over half a century, generating tens of millions of dollars in revenue. Ever since Electra Records erected a fourteen-by-forty-eight-foot bulletin for the Doors’ debut album at 8161 West Sunset, in 1967, billboards have filled out the field of vision that wasn’t already taken up by the ticky-tacky storefronts of cheap music venues, dive bars, strip clubs, liquor stores, and other magnets for hippies and fun-loving teens, many of them radicalized by recent clashes with police over the enforcement of a youth curfew on the Sunset Strip. Jim Morrison and co. were quickly cycled out for other colossal avatars—Abbey Road–era Beatles, Marvin Gaye, Donna Summer, and Cher, to name a few—whose overscaled likenesses functioned as guarantors of hype and sales. (In what was perhaps a heady case of early guerrilla marketing, the aluminum-and-vinyl body of Paul McCartney, having been decapitated by teenage vandals, was purposely, and with an eye toward intrigue, left in its acephalous state for the remainder of the record promoter’s monthlong ad spend.)
To have cruised past the Laugh Factory—the Strip’s eastern gateway—and the Chateau Marmont and then be assaulted by an enfilade of oblong eye-catchers—million-dollar faces, hokey slogans—must have felt like careening through the expanded terrain of a primetime television show, commercials and all. Ed Ruscha famously laid this special effect bare in Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), a twenty-seven-foot-long accordion-format photo book that resists the delirious forward motion the Strip seems to mandate.
Then and now, the environmental graphics of the Sunset Strip, as on its Las Vegas counterpart and in Times Square, are so numerous and varied as to relegate the architecture to a supporting role. The best of these buildings includes a few workaday midcentury offices and paradors, such as the Brat green cylinder at 8760 West Sunset that Oscar Niemeyer is said to have designed in 1967 for a plastic surgeon and the defunct Standard Hotel at 8322, soon to be reopened by New York hotelier Ian Schrager. Built as the Thunderbird Motel by architect Herbert Kameon in 1962, the guesthouse, whose rippling balconies and fasciae have made it a local landmark, is currently undergoing Schragerization in the shadow of an ersatz digital marquee operated by Netflix.
These days, it’s mostly bad vibes on the Strip, which grasps at the past and the future with equal desperation. The street that was once a hotbed for youth culture has evolved into, on the one hand, a string of real estate ventures pricing out longstanding businesses (“For Lease” is the most common advertisement one will find here) and, on the other, an open-air media lab intended to replenish West Hollywood’s coffers amid uncertain economic times. As an increasingly distracted public buries its collective head in smart phones, the film industry retreats from risk, and tourism, assailed by a pandemic and fires, declines, the local advertising infrastructure peacocks with none of the cool self-assurance of the Marlboro Man. OOH (out-of-home) advertising is booming, much of the DOOH (digital out-of-home) variety. It’s also straying from the Strip, long the nucleus of adventurous billboard construction in the area; a December 2023 vote by the city council gave advertisers the clear to spam the city’s streets and highways with LED clatter.
Those ground-level enterprises that have managed to cling on appear uneasy about their analog nature, anxious to close the gap between physical real estate and our digital devices. The storefront of the Fame by Sheeraz media consultancy business, at 8367 West Sunset, for instance, invites passersby to scan an oversized QR code to “chat” with Robert, an AI robot trained on financial data. Nearby, the Lab Athletic Club, at 8305 West Sunset, has commandeered a parking spot out front for the quasi-permanent display of an aggressively branded Cybertruck. (It sports a pair of QR codes on its flanks and, across the trunk, a graphic that barks “DON’T BE A LITTLE BITCH.”) The greige façade at 8711 West Sunset identifies the company Sargon Dentistry as the “inventor of the Ultratooth” and depicts a 24/7 LED monitor on which footage loops, TikTok-style, of an ultratoothy female model biting into an apple. Like many struggling businesses, the once-acclaimed music venue Whisky a Go Go has, for over a decade, assented to renting out its curving façade to Hollywood studios. (Last I checked, it was plastered with Freakier Friday posters.)
Passengers on line 2 of the Metro bus don’t seem to notice any of this, nor do they seem all that bothered by the traffic that reliably bottlenecks toward the middle of the Strip. Throughout the stifling commute, they remain glued to their smartphones, the advent of which has dealt a death blow to nearly every presumption of the twentieth-century attention economy, which gave rise to the Strip in the first place. Mostly, they scroll through TikToks and Reels that become more targeted with every swipe. On this particular ride, I myself am engrossed in a sickening, AI-generated “day in the life” video of a teenager in 1960s suburban America. Managing to come up for air, I look out the window and clock pedestrians and even drivers engaged in the same activity: all of us hoping to annihilate time through nonlinear distraction. “Today’s ways of seeing,” the art critic Claire Bishop writes in Disordered Attention (2024), “are not just so much dispersed and distributed as incessantly hybrid: both present and mediated, live and online, fleeting and profound, individual and collective.” When the images in our hands provide us with such a great sense of agency over our divided attention, why bother looking up?
Some billboard companies are no longer betting that you will. Nearly a decade ago, Clear Channel Outdoor (CCO), one of the largest signage operators on the Strip, began extracting mobile phone data from pedestrians and drivers to more accurately gauge consumer interests. The so-called RADAR program piqued the ire of Democratic senator Chuck Schumer. “A person’s cellphone should not become a James Bond–like personal tracking device for a corporation to gather information about consumers without their consent,” he said in 2016, but the data-harvesting continues today through CCO’s expanded suite of proprietary “data solutions.” In 2023, speaking at an industry event hosted by Variety and the software company Canva, CCO executive vice president Dan Levi downplayed the clandestine operations of so-called “spying billboards,” instead touting the benefit of “be[ing] able to measure any kind of outcome that our clients are looking to drive with billboard advertising.”
In LA, those clients tend to be app makers and streaming services. After taking up blocks of Hollywood real estate for its headquarters, Netflix gobbled up a whopping eighteen billboards (furnished by purveyor Regency Outdoor) up and down the Strip with which to form multipanel “narratives” for low-risk, low-effort sequels. Wednesday Addams’s sulking visage, duplicated at opposite ends of Sunset, advertises a second season of kidult content (“Honk if you hate it here,” reads one), while Happy Gilmore drives a golf ball through a giant Subway sandwich to announce the character’s comeback (and the limited-time Happy Gilmore Meal). The ever-changing text on the baleful signboard by the shell of the Standard consists of quips from such media properties as Squid Game, Stranger Things, and You, intelligible only after hours of binge-watching. Meanwhile, at ground level, the Oppenheim Group, a mega-mansion real estate firm whose fame skyrocketed with the streamer’s reality series Selling Sunset, has taken to erecting a tall hedge outside its flagship office on the Strip to block onlookers from peeking inside.
As the self-called “custodian of the billboard legacy on the Strip,” the city of West Hollywood has made a concerted effort to up the ante on billboard showmanship. The trio of souped-up signs commissioned from Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects by the municipality and built in partnership with ACE Outdoor, have the improvisatory feel of napkin sketches; in one instance, a supporting armature is blue and bendy, like an inflatable tube man. But these are simply fussy updates on the classic sign-on-a-stick setup. The Sunset Arts & Advertising program, unveiled by the city in 2019, was premised on visual novelty while also facilitating the conversion from static signs to digital screens, of which Angelenos continue to have a negative opinion. (Studies linking distractions in urban environments to car accidents suggest that the push could contribute to a spike in crashes.) As many as seventeen digital signs are on the docket, but only a handful have been realized. From the looks of some of the proposals, in particular a misbegotten building-LED billboard hybrid envisioned by Eric Owen Moss Architects for the corner lot at 8301 West Sunset (RIP Cabo Cantina), it would be advisable to keep it that way.
Supporters of the program will nonetheless cite the $500 million in revenue projected from digital advertising over the next twenty years—dollars that will ostensibly make their way to affordable housing and other public service benefits, though any such plans have yet to be made public. In some cases, developers have circumvented the city to directly partner with billboard ventures such as Orange Barrel Media (OBM). Plussed-up marketing opportunities partly underpin the financing of the Now, a showy commercial project at 8497 Sunset designed by the architectural offices of Mithun and Hodgetts + Fung. Though the interior fit-out is ongoing, the massive LED box, which pivots out from the southeast corner of the building, is fully operational. Rotating promos for Red Bull and Waymo are permanently captioned with the words “Orange Barrel Media,” etched into the concrete wall below.
OBM was also behind the construction of Sunset Spectacular, the $14 million metallic turd that stands at the edge of a parking lot at 8775 West Sunset. The company worked with the WeHo municipality and architect Tom Wiscombe to realize the towering three-dimensional structure, whose interlocking screens—set flush within jagged, stainless-steel modules—cycle, predictably, through flash graphics from Target and Starbucks. The mass is hollowed out, allowing visitors to step inside—though it’s unclear what to do at that point, other than to marvel at the aerospace-engineered joinery. Wiscombe, an establishment figure within the historically iconoclastic Southern California Institute of Architecture before becoming accused of academic misconduct, maintained that the assemblage exuded the qualities desirable of public art. Which are what, on a street like this?
According to WeHo politicos, public art in the vicinity should “engage diverse perspectives, challenge the status quo, and recommit the Sunset Strip as a dynamic, artistic, and cultural destination.” The verbiage is buried in a press release for the Moving Image Media Art Program (MIMA), launched in 2022 as an initiative of Sunset Arts & Advertising. On select billboards along the Strip, regular broadcasting is interrupted by ten-minute segments featuring works by contemporary artists.
This bid for popular edification, however, was notably undermined when the proprietor of a billboard at 9157 Sunset blocked a planned broadcast of Nancy Baker Cahill’s Body Politic (2024) last October. The outdoor advertising company Big Outdoor had shared the video with the owner, a MAGA donor, and honored his request to pull the artwork in a violation of its contract with the city (participation in Sunset Arts & Advertising stipulates compliance with MIMA programming). “I’m an artist, and my work is being censored,” Cahill responded in an Instagram post that also cited themes of reproductive justice, data privacy, and voting rights. “This work, which is about the dangers of being silenced, is being silenced.”
Other entries in the series have escaped such reproof, albeit at the expense of any public notoriety. (Alas, the only airtime provided to art occurs when it overlaps with controversy.) Recently, I hopped off the bus at 4:00 p.m. to check out Sara Ludy’s Metamimics (2023), which plays on a tipsy-looking “media folly” at 9157 West Sunset designed by Culver City outfit OFFICEUNTITLED. If one is only paying divided attention, Ludy’s avatars—thrust into a carnivalesque gala or onto a windswept beach, among other sumptuous mise-en-scènes—would seem to be models in a woozy perfume commercial.
Under more disciplined inspection, the glitching, AI-bred figures appear to twist and moan, while the lush but erratically flickering backdrops constantly threaten to break the spell. For ten precious minutes, the billboard was selling nothing to anyone but little old me. The video faded to black before presenting a still image of the America’s Got Talent judges, all grinning ear to ear.
