Untitled by AUDC

One Wilshire is a nondescript 39 story modernist skyscraper designed by Skidmore Owings and Merrill and located in downtown Los Angeles. Originally built to house law offices, One Wilshire gradually became obsolete—along with the rest of downtown Los Angeles—in the 1980s, as yet another victim of the corporate office park. By the 1990s, however, One Wilshire’s fate turned around when the building was retrofitted as telecom or carrier hotel. Now the premier communications hub for the Western US, One Wilshire leases space to over 260 telecom related companies. With more and more such companies located in One Wilshire, the building managers set up a Meet-Me room on the fourth floor in which free interconnections could be made more cheaply and easily between the carriers. Now if a Guatemalan phone card company needs to connect to Spring or one Internet company needs to connect to another, they can simply run a fiber optic interconnect between their routers without costly fees. One Wilshire’s function as a major hub in the global network makes it the most expensive real estate inthe country, renting out at $250 per square foot.

One Wilshire embodies the invisible physical spatiality supporting the virtual space of telecommunications and networking. But One Wilshire is also an icon of the nothingness that permeates our lives. Just like the Internet, One Wilshire is nothing without content. Its expressionless architecture has to be augmented by a sign “One Wilshire” emblazoned on all four sides. But One Wilshire is actually at 624 S. Grand Avenue, off axis to the boulevard it claims to anchor. One Wilshire’s exterior is mute about its internal function, the building could have any shape, any form. Critic Greg Goldin has written of One Wilshire, “It could be a flat, black box; it could be a green mound, it could be a stainless-steel funnel…” Moreover, even if One Wilshire is an icon of Los Angeles, its name forever linked to the city, its function tied to its role as a servant of telecommunications-hungry global metropolis, it is also just a node on a global infomatic grid. It could be anywhere. In returning to the desert, One Wilshire enjoys a much needed vacation from the hectic pace of downtown and joins in a long tradition of modernist monuments in the desert, from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin, Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House, Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh, Superstudio’s Continuous Monument, Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti, and the opulent desert retreat that explodes at the end of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point.