Telco Hotel Central
Exhibit
at CLUI Los Angeles
One Wilshire, as seen from the rooftop patio
of the new Standard Hotel, with its bright red fiberglass waterbed
nests. CLUI photo
On the outside, One Wilshire is an ordinary-looking
30-story 1960’s office tower in Los Angeles, located at
a prestigious address: the point where Wilshire Boulevard, the
city’s grand west-heading avenue, meets downtown. On the
inside is quite a different story: One Wilshire is a telco hotel,
said to be the “most interconnected building in the west.”
The interior is packed full of telecommunications equipment, connected
to the world through dozens of major fiber optic conduits that
spill into the building’s below-grade parking garage, from
conduits running under the streets outside, and rise through the
tower like an infestation of electronic vines.
The busting of the telco boom has put the owners of the building
(the notorious, privately-held investment comapny The Carlysle
Group) in the position of eager real estate agents, seeking tenants
to plug into their new fiber terminal rooms, which offer more
bandwidth interconnectivity, especially for direct Asian links,
than nearly anywhere else in America. This new posture of publicity
enabled the Center to have an unprecedented look inside this remarkable
building, and to glimpse some dramatic physical and architectural
manifestations of the often invisible, expanding global infosphere.
Equipped with digital cameras and video recorders, the CLUI,
led by urban historian Kazys Varnelis, toured the facility with
the building’s manager, Chris Pachall. While a few floors
have lawyers offices, most of the building is sectioned into rooms
with corridors of server and telecommunication switching racks,
often protected by cages, and strung together with coaxial and
fiber optic cable, bulging from ceiling-mounted raceways. The
resulting exhibit was mounted at the CLUI’s Los Angeles
exhibit space within a few weeks, and Kazys Varnelis, who teaches
at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, delivered
a talk, Towers of Concentration, Lines of Growth, on Friday August
29, 2002.
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