Respected architects and developers point to problems as well. Gwynne Pugh was a partner in Pugh + Scarpa, the architectural firm honored by the American Institute of Architects as Firm of the Year in 2010. He's a planning commissioner for the city of Santa Monica and heads the Gwynne Pugh Urban Studio.
"If [the lighting] is for the purposes of art and decoration alone, then it becomes a part of the aesthetic," he tells the Weekly. "But the moment you are asking people to look at it for the purposes of selling a product, it becomes a billboard."
A devout urbanist, Pugh believes that sign districts have an important place within the city's landscape. But, he says, "There's nothing worse than spot zoning. ... It smacks of special favors."
Longtime L.A. developer Jim Suhr says sign districts in L.A. should encompass a distinct area, not be a single building or project, "because what happens here is that property owner X down the street is getting some of the impacts — and none of the benefits," he says.
For that reason, Pugh predicts lawsuits against the city. Suhr concurs: "Various buildings on either side" of the two ad-draped skyscrapers will "want a cut of the cake, too."
Both Perry and Reyes say they hope to turn the area south of the Wilshire Grand, and adjacent to L.A. Live, into a sign district, and Hanjin is contributing $400,000 for an Environmental Impact Report to study that idea. Hanjin's ad-wrapped skyscrapers could be viewed as "anchors for a proposed sign district," Reyes says.
But the underlying issue is the vast amount of new ad dollars that will flow to wealthy L.A. skyscraper and building developers.
San Francisco Beautiful's Hanke, who heads a wealth management company and is not exactly antibusiness, calls digitally ad-wrapped buildings "a form of blight that discourages healthy development that adds to your tax base."
He says reaping such advertising revenue from the outside of buildings becomes more valuable than leasing the space inside the building.
"Are the buildings being built for buildings, or for signs?" Consumer Watchdog's Court asks of the Wilshire Grand project.
For instance, Manhattan's famed triangular building, One Times Square, is cited as a model for Hollywood's and L.A. Live's flashy future. But for years, One Times Square was essentially uninhabited. The flashing ads on the outside were the real payoff, not the rental of spaces inside.
Michael Woo, an L.A. city planning commissioner and dean of the College of Environmental Design at Cal Poly Pomona, fears developments that are mere "platforms for advertising instead of the architecture of the buildings themselves."
He's not opposed to dramatic lighting to enhance the skyline, but warns of developers who "start depending on the revenue from billboards to finance a building — and that seems to be a trend in L.A. these days."
AEG revealed on Feb. 17 that it wants outdoor advertising around the proposed NFL stadium downtown, Farmers Field, to help pay off bonds to finance it. The lucrative "additional exterior signage rights" would grace not just the stadium but "new parking structures," and even "the existing Convention Center" owned by the public. It's gotten little attention from the City Council and media, who have focused on AEG's plan to reap ticket taxes and parking fees, among other things, to pay off an estimated $350 million in stadium bonds.
Court and Hanke warn of the specter of largely empty, but heavily billboarded, buildings elsewhere in the city as City Council members permit special sign districts that boost earnings for outdoor advertising firms — who in turn support their political campaigns.
The Wilshire Grand sign district, Court says, "is a big 'For Sale' sign that Jan [Perry's] putting up for her mayoral campaign."
