AUDC at High Desert Test Sites, May 2005

AUDC will be at High Desert Test Sites on May 6 and 7, bringing telecom hotel One Wilshire back to the desert.

Greg Goldin explains the project far more succinctly than I could in an article he wrote for the LA Weekly last year:

Seen from the outside, function doesn’t matter. Windows, mullions, floor dividers, two-story-high lettering, are all, now, superfluous. One Wilshire could take any shape, have any exterior. And ””? here’s where the fun or disaster begins ””? the cyberbuilding is free from the traditional demands of architecture to produce an effect or meaning, the way, say, Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall billows atop Bunker Hill or Norman Foster’s Swiss Re tower blasts off into the cosmos above London. It could be a flat, black box; it could be a green mound; it could be a stainless-steel funnel.

One Wilshire, as “Ether” shows, is architecture without moorings. The building can be picked up and moved anywhere and deployed for any purpose. And so the exhibit ends with a photograph of the scale model transplanted to a rocky cul-de-sac in Joshua Tree National Monument. Wildly out of context, One Wilshire remains stupefyingly unchanged by the new surroundings. A frightening realization, yet one perfectly suited to the “empire of ether.”

AUDC will be at High Desert Test Sites on May 6 and 7, bringing telecom hotel One Wilshire back to the desert.

Greg Goldin explains the project far more succinctly than I could in an article he wrote for the LA Weekly last year:

Seen from the outside, function doesn’t matter. Windows, mullions, floor dividers, two-story-high lettering, are all, now, superfluous. One Wilshire could take any shape, have any exterior. And ””? here’s where the fun or disaster begins ””? the cyberbuilding is free from the traditional demands of architecture to produce an effect or meaning, the way, say, Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall billows atop Bunker Hill or Norman Foster’s Swiss Re tower blasts off into the cosmos above London. It could be a flat, black box; it could be a green mound; it could be a stainless-steel funnel.

One Wilshire, as “Ether” shows, is architecture without moorings. The building can be picked up and moved anywhere and deployed for any purpose. And so the exhibit ends with a photograph of the scale model transplanted to a rocky cul-de-sac in Joshua Tree National Monument. Wildly out of context, One Wilshire remains stupefyingly unchanged by the new surroundings. A frightening realization, yet one perfectly suited to the “empire of ether.”