West Hollywood Sunset Spectacular Park Area is Now Open to the Public

The construction fence around the West Hollywood Sunset Spectacular multimedia billboard has been pushed back at 8775 Sunset Boulevard. The park space around the 67 foot billboard is now accessible to the public. Members of the community can walk through futuristic structure and have a seat at the new benches and enjoy the garden facing the Sunset Strip.

The public can also enjoy ONE Archives‘ yearlong public digital art installation currently on display at the giant billboard. The digital art installation will run from April 4, 2022 – to April 6, 2023 and screens at the top of every hour.

Designed by architect Tom Wiscombe, The West Hollywood Sunset Spectacular is a multimedia billboard for the 21st century. It is conceived of as four giant parts: three outer planes with a “tesseract” nested inside. The tesseract is tilted, seemingly oriented to align with something other than earth’s gravity; it intersects the outer planes, creating giant figural involutions. The entire structure is subdivided not into the sticks and panels of human scale, but rather into chunks resembling oversized puzzle pieces, each built to stack and assemble with little human labor. Rather than being defined by an entrenched architectural hierarchy of mass to detail, the project maintains a consistently low resolution relative to the human scale, as if it had been created by much larger beings. It sits on a ground that peels up off the land like a magic carpet, defining a discrete world nested within the city. The cornerstone of the Sunset Spectacular is Arts on Sunset, an ongoing public digital art project developed by Orange Barrel Media and organized by curator Diana Nawi.

@WeHoCity’s Sunset Spectacular park area is now open to the public at 8775 Sunset Blvd. people can walk through the 67ft billboard structure and enjoy the garden facing the Sunset Strip. Check it out. #wehotimes #wehonews #westhollywood #wehocity pic.twitter.com/O6adwCuxaH

— WEHO TIMES (@WEHO_TIMES) May 18, 2022

The Architect’s Newspaper (www.archpaper.com) reports Local firm Tom Wiscombe Architecture (TWA) developed the project alongside Orange Barrel Media for a 2016 city-sponsored competition, fending off stiff challenges from the likes of Zaha Hadid Architects and Gensler. In the several exploded diagrams that TWA prepared for its submission entry, the assembly of the individual building pieces mirrors that of a model set.

100 tons of stainless steel went into the construction. The components—or, per Wiscombe, “superstructure chunks”—were loaded onto 770-foot-long super-load lowrider trailers for the 2,300-mile trek west. Each piece arrived on-site in West Hollywood with a loose back panel that allowed them to be bolted together on their perimeter faces. (That connection was subsequently concealed.) A 90-foot-tall industrial crane hoisted the “chunks” into place; arranged in three towering panels, they form a cocoon around a pedestrian-accessible central void. Suspended overhead is a sculptural entity that appears to stabilize the heaving mass.

There is still construction happening at parking lot, so the space is not completely open. It is not yet clear when the parking improvements will be completed.