Sunset Urban Theater

The proposal for 8844 Sunset Blvd. seeks to adapt and expand the existing building by incorporating new offsite signage that acts not only as a blank surface for entertainment, advertisement, and contemporary art in West Hollywood, but as a theatrical, technological, and ecological backdrop for the unfolding of a new kind of public life. Furthering the vision, goals, and policies of the Sunset Specific Plan, our project takes advantage of its strategic location in order to create an ‘urban theater’ that fosters a much-needed public life and pedestrian oriented activity associated with the iconic Sunset Strip.

Within a social narrative where digital media and visual aesthetics constantly and vigorously intertwine, the iconicity of the project is not only predicated on its capacity to produce new images along the Sunset Strip — be them Instagram selfies, ads for a new TV series or blockbuster movie, civic messages, or car commercials — but to present the public imagination of Los Angeles, and West Hollywood in particular, within a new ecologically centered public realm. Unique to this project is a surrounding green-media wall. As the main artifice of the project, it incorporates the most important elements of the proposal, signaling unequivocally that at the intersection of art, media, technology, architecture, nature, and public life can exist a socially engaged, visually and aesthetically inspiring space. The project thus asserts a hopeful future, one that does not need to arrive in a Blade Runner style cataclysm but rather can do so through a progressive agenda like the one the City of West Hollywood pioneers.