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don't let its meager exterior fool you this building is home to the most expensive commercial real estate in the entire United States the building is known as one Wilshire Boulevard as you can see by the name printed on the top architecturally it's a pretty
nondescript 1960s office building designed by The Firm Som well that firm does have some pretty amazing buildings to their credit I think that most people would agree this isn't one of them but in 2013 this building sold for 437
million dollars the 660 dollars per square foot of leasable space that's by far the highest price paid of any office building in Downtown LA that's a lot of money today it's about
855 dollars per square foot or nine thousand dollars per square meter but why would this of all buildings be so desirable you'd probably guess that it must be due to its fantastic location while you'd be
right it's probably not for the reason that you think it does have spectacular views but no better than its neighbors most of these neighbors are also newer and feature more traditional amenities what its location offers and what this building
takes on a paralleled advantage of is incredible access to the internet while the internet moves at the speed of light for processes where even fractions of a millisecond count physical location
on the globe still matters and for that one Wilshire is positioned perfectly the building is what is known as a carrier Hotel an urban structure that hosts the servers and equipment that power the internet
carrier hotels are critical infrastructure for modern communication and commerce they're also known as co-location facilities because they house networking and Telecommunications equipment for multiple companies these
facilities provide a secure reliable and efficient environment for businesses to house their I.T infrastructure and connect with other networks so this building houses the world's largest telecom companies and the connections to
each other's networks Verizon at T Sprint international carriers including China Telecom China Unicom all have offices and I.T equipment in this building also other businesses that rely
on critical connections to the web like Amazon Google and Netflix all call this building home in total it has 250 network service providers so the building is important because it houses nodes on all of these networks but what
is it about this location that makes it so significant for this work well carrier hotels are often located in dense Urban environments where multiple corporations are located and need Connections in Downtown LA certainly
fits the bill one mil shirt is ideally suited to serve the Region's entertainment media gaming and high-tech firms along with traditional areas such as Healthcare finance and higher education but this building is also located just
in Linda or much of the Asia's internet traffic arrives through undersea cables to serve the North American continent so connecting directly to this important exchange allows one Wilshire to maintain a seamless a connection as possible to
both Asia and the rest of the United States further the building's height means that it has unbroken lines of sight to other buildings in the area for microwave and other antennae to connect across Airwaves it's like a beacon or a
lighthouse with invisible information streaming in and out of it it is likely the most connected building in the world it has thousands and thousands of little orange cables running into the building and stopping
on one of its 30 floors the orange color also Graces the sidewalk outside that's because La color codes its various infrastructure networks underground red for power blue for water orange for networking and so on and the fact that
this quality of the building above all else is what it can offer shows a lot about what we value the role of the city in contemporary life and how the build environment serves to support and enable
our lives this marks a significant difference between the way that we traditionally think of this city and the way that it actually works today in the past visible geographic features were often the organizers of cities access to
a river for instance meant routes for transportation power for manufacturing maybe even sources for food but today the important infrastructure that powers the engine of the city is often invisible the theorist kazis for Nellis argues
that one wilshere is a major piece of global economic engine it's part of a telecommunications economy that recently supplanted Aerospace is one of the Region's leading Global Industries and helped to support the rise of Hollywood's entertainment economy the
entire system converges in a single-use vertical Hub centered at one Wilshire a bland high-rise distinguished only by the extra large cooling units on its roof and the proliferation of orange markings on the surrounding Paving I've
often thought about the movie The Matrix was in part a critical cautionary tale of this condition no longer is important infrastructure marked with Monumental constructions instead they're buried underground and hidden from sight The
Matrix tells the tale of what happens if we are banished forever to this realm the wachowskis aren't the only ones using their creative medium to reconcile this extreme disconnection between our digital worlds and our physical ones
when we're sort of like inside of these kinds of impersonal office spaces aren't we as good as machines at that point you know I also spoke with Jimenez Lai who was commissioned by the downtown Center business improvement district to
communicate the complicated role of the building and time and space as a part of that study we wrote a story about one Wilshire and this story was
represented in the form of not exactly a comic book but something like a set of storyboards Juan Wilshire is a building inside of the skyline of downtown Los Angeles which is inside of this window
which is inside of this room this room is inside of a model which is inside of a photo shoot this photo shoot is inside of a file
which is inside of a computer which is inside of an office space which is inside of a file that is part of a network of files that is inside of a server which is inside of a network of servers
that is inside of one Wilshire audc because these for analysis practice installed a model of one and Wilshire on a desert Bluff in the 2006 High Desert test sites show relocating when Wilshire to the Mojave Desert underscores the
unstable reconfiguration of space that Network culture produces one Wiltshire could be anywhere in Downtown LA in the desert in your bedroom or the Mariana's Trench space is something entirely different to us today
in this sense one Wilshire is an unlikely Monument it looks like the most generic office building in the world maybe one that Neo and the Matrix would have worked at as Thomas Anderson not as Neo but the building obviously isn't just a
monument it's a working piece of infrastructure there's the densest access to dark lit fiber in all the southwestern United States in order to maintain unbroken access and to support such a burdensome electrical load the building has been renovated to
offer high-grade stable utility power from the LA Department of Water and Power it has five separate utility power risers 11 on-site Diesel power generators and enough fuel storage for 24 hours of continuous operation and of
course there's 24 7 365 days a year manned security and card control access on the fourth floor is an area called a MeetMe room and this is the largest one in the country a MeetMe room or an MMR
also known as a network access point is a physical space within a data center or Carrier hotel where different telecommunication carriers isps content providers and other network service providers come together to interconnect their networks and exchange traffic it
is a neutral location where carriers can exchange traffic with each other and with other network service providers without the need for costly and time-consuming direct connections Mimi rooms are particularly important for Content providers such as streaming
video companies and social media platforms which need to ensure that their content is delivered quickly and reliably to end users of course the building didn't start this way in the 1960s and it took a pretty
interesting road to get here it was designed in the mid-1960s as a speculative office building by The Firm Skidmore Owings and Merrell the building expresses its frame and offers the type of open Office environment that was
popular at the time a regular column grid with a core and as few other impediments as possible Furniture does the rest of the work but this generic architectural space for activities led to some strange
conditions over time as our work life took on a life of its own I feel that the disadvantages are outweighed by the advantages like this and it doesn't suit everybody
we go Bureau landshaft where the scattering of desks you know supposedly creates territories and humans are doing this way and then we get like stuff like action office where we eventually
develop into cubicles where there's like let's say personal spaces within the workspaces uh where you kind of like per like specify and personalize your own zone of work you know the sterility of
these kinds of drop ceiling um spaces like every place any place in this uh of the office environment it seems that one Wilshire has always had a crisis of location curiously the building isn't actually located at the
address one Wilshire Boulevard it actually sits at 624 South Grand Avenue when Wilshire was a marketing name developed afterward Wilshire Boulevard is an important Avenue connecting long disparate parts of LA and houses
government and corporate headquarters the building was originally home to law offices and today there's still a few left over but by the 1990s people were moving out the building was showing its age and downtown LA wasn't quite the
corporate destination that it once was the owners need to Define new tenants and they tried to take advantage of the Strategic potential it's also located near the SBC communication pockbell Central switching
station at 400 South Grand with his towering now obsolete microwave antenna long distance carrier MCI thus mounted its own microwave station on the roof of one Wilshire at the time one of the tallest buildings with good sight lines
to downtown and in 1992 one Wilshire underwent a major renovation to facilitate its new role upgrading its power and cooling infrastructure La is a city of infrastructure and flows they turned a river into a bleak
concrete Channel highways laced through and Define life here these constructions don't make for pretty places at the same time La is the place of glitzy images presentations and Stage sets these two
worlds the infrastructure and the spectacular display are usually kept separate here but in some ways they come together curiously at one Wilshire movies stream to you through this building but the building itself is nothing much to look at
this is the nature of sites of logistics places like Amazon distribution centers are covering an increasingly large footprint on the Earth but they're not really spaces for people through the spaces for the flow of things and information out of sight and out of mind
despite their crucial importance in our lives at Large whereas there was a time when layers upon layers of paperwork was processed by layers upon layers of humans inside of office spaces and that paperwork what
it generates is data right by the turn of the 21st century it did get replaced we continued to use the office tower for what it is uh just that the constituent
processing that data uh is not human this time one will show represents a challenge for architecture in one sense it's the future of digital infrastructure yet it's almost a completely generic office building the
building itself and its kind of outward design almost doesn't seem to matter it's more about what the building can do during the 1800s railroads were cut through our cities during the 1950s highways were the new urgent physical
connections that needed to be cut right through our cities today it's places like one Wilshire it's not a building for people but it's a building for cables and the fact that it doesn't look like much means I can hide and play in sight
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today if you enjoyed this video please consider hitting that like button subscribe to the channel if you haven't already what are your thoughts about data centers masquerading as Anonymous Office Buildings leave your thoughts in the comments section below then show check out some of these other videos
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