Treating the Teslarati (The Architect's Newspaper)
https://www.archpaper.com/2025/08/tesla-diner-indulges-expense-neighborhood/
A week after opening on a corner of Orange Drive and Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood, the line to get into the Tesla Diner was wrapped around a quarter of its semi-circular facade, and slow moving. The two 66-foot LED screens lining the edge of the property played an entire episode of 2 Broke Girls, followed by an AI-generated video of the cosmos, followed by an extended commercial for a Cybertruck driving through a red rock desert. The parking lot was lined with supercharging stations and a parade of Teslas parked alongside them, many of which were customized with camo-skinned hubcaps, chrome bodies and “don’t bet against Elon” bumper stickers.
Still waiting in line, I peeked through the tinted glass to discover that the diner’s interior was half-empty—either a crowd control measure or a strategy for making the enterprise appear more popular from the outside. Both reasons would point to the fact that the diner needed things to go well following a turbulent opening week. Protests erupted along the boulevard two days prior to my visit, transferring the activist energy from Tesla showrooms to Elon Musk’s latest venture. Visible opposition to the billionaire’s political influence and dog-whistle rhetoric has since been snuffed out by a flurry of “Tesla Security” guards. Though the intention is to preserve the diner’s “retro-futuristic” vibes, the presence of enforcement ultimately breaks the spell.
The local architecture firm Stantec worked hard to spatialize the qualities of the Tesla brand and its products, down to the inconsistent gaps in the facade’s metal paneling. Stepping into the ground floor dining area further demonstrates how fine the line really is between the fastidious minimalism of an Apple store and the cartoonish detailing of a theme park restaurant. The mid-century-esque seating, long countertop, and Tomorrowland-style finishes all point aggressively in the same direction, as overhead cove lighting leaves little room for shadows in the 24-hour establishment.
The nostalgia wafts upstairs to the Skypad, the second-story outdoor pavilion, where the sense of permanence through built-in furniture was prioritized over the inclusion of simple shading devices. This mistake, made far too often in restaurants across Southern California, leads to a lot of sun-baked tables and customers standing elsewhere in search of cover.
The aesthetics of the entire enterprise are meant to send the visitor back in time about 70 years, when automobility and suburban development was primed to solve every problem that could possibly arise from modern life, as well as to the future, when all the problems of modern life will be behind us since colonizing Mars (somehow). The smell of cheeseburgers and the sight of freshly paved asphalt just outside clash with Tesla’s mission stated above the self-service screens: “Accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy.”
The assertion piggybacks off the concept of “hedonistic sustainability” touted by Bjarke Ingels over a decade ago and could become the slogan of “green capitalism,” an attempt defined by sociologist Nick J. Fox as “to use free-market mechanisms to mitigate anthropogenic climate change.” Conservation through consumption sounds too good to be true, because it is. If architecture is to respond adequately to the climate crisis, it should be neither “retro” nor “futuristic,” but resourceful, and shaped by community input.
There is, to be fair, some method to the madness. While the fast, free and open design of a typical gas station is informed by the little time it takes to fill a gas tank, an electric charging station must contend with a much slower time scale. When a Tesla battery requires as little as 15 minutes for a “supercharge” and as much as 8-10 hours for a full charge, the incorporation of a drive-in movie theatre and a diner to the grounds is a well-reasoned appeal to the wants and needs of the Teslarati.
And yet, indifferent to its urban surroundings, every convenience offered to those on the property is at the expense of those just beyond it. The LED screens are a nuisance to the west-facing units of the apartment building recently completed on the opposite side of Orange Drive, who are now subjected to their boyish programming at all times of day. The screen to the north is an outright visual obstruction and potential lawsuit to the units just behind it, as several residents recently complained to KTLA 5. It’s only a matter of time before we hear of a five-car pile up caused by a driver distracted by a rerun of 2 Broke Girls.
Musk claims the Tesla Diner has long been planned as a prototype for supercharging stations across the country, but the choice to place the first of its kind here, of all places, makes it come across as a spite building—the urban equivalent of trolling dissenters online. The streetlife of Santa Monica Boulevard, which has long been animated by roadside taco stands operated by immigrants, has been turned upside down almost overnight by ICE raids that occurred during the tail end of Musk’s brief position within the United States government. Fantasies of the past and of the future coalesce, at the Tesla Diner, as a present with little tolerance for the messy reality just outside the property line.
