For graffiti artists, abandoned skyscrapers in Miami and Los Angeles become a canvas for regular people to be seen and heard
In 2023-2024, graffiti artists tagged abandoned skyscrapers in Los Angeles and Miami, highlighting financial and political issues through their large, visible artworks.
Last Updated on September 18, 2024 by Daily News StaffConstruction of Oceanwide Plaza in downtown Los Angeles stalled in 2019 after the China-based developer ran out of funding. Mario Tama/Getty Images
In what’s known as “graffiti bombing,” artists in both cities swiftly and extensively tagged downtown skyscrapers that had been abandoned. The efforts took place over the course of a few nights in December 2023 and late January 2024, with the results generating a mix of admiration and condemnation.
KTLA 5 news highlights public outrage over a graffitied skyscraper in Los Angeles on Jan. 31, 2024.
As someone who has researched the intersection of graffiti and activism, I see these works as major milestones – and not just because the artists’ tags are perhaps more prominent than they’ve ever been, high above street level and visible from blocks away.
They also get to the heart of how money and politics can make individuals feel powerless – and how art can reclaim some of that power.
Since late 2019, Los Angeles’ billion-dollar Oceanwide Plaza – a mixed-use residential and retail complex consisting of three towers – has stood unfinished. The Beijing-based developer was unable to pay contractors, and ongoing financing challenges forced the company to put the project on pause. It’s located in one of the priciest parts of the city, right across the street from Crypto.com Arena, where the 2024 Grammy Awards were held.
Hundreds of taggers were involved in the Los Angeles graffiti bombing. It may never be publicly known how the idea was formed and by whom. But it seemed to have been inspired by a similar project that took place in Miami during Art Basel, the city’s annual international art fair.
In November 2023, the city of Miami announced that a permit to demolish One Bayfront Plaza site, an abandoned former VITAS Healthcare building, had been filed.
Over the course of a few days, graffiti artists – some of whom rappelled down the side of the building – tagged the brutalist, concrete structure with colorful bubble letters spelling their graffiti names: “EDBOX,” “SAUTE” and “1UP,” and hundreds more.
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The response to the Miami bombing was more awe than outrage, perhaps because the building will soon be torn down. It elicited comparisons to 5Pointz, a collection of former factory buildings in the Queens borough of New York City that was covered with graffiti and became a landmark before being demolished in 2014.
Meaning and motivation
In the early 2000s, when I started researching street graffiti, I learned that there are different names for different graffiti types.
“Tags” are pseudonyms written in marker, sometimes with flourishes. “Fill-ins” or “throw-ups” are quickly painted fat letters or bubble letters, usually outlined. “Pieces” involve more colorful, complicated and stylized spray-painted letters.
The tradition of painting ornate graffiti names made me think of Paul Cézanne, who painted the same bowl of fruit over and over. The carefully chosen names and their letters become the subject that writers use to practice their craft.
But I also wanted to know why people graffitied.
Many graffiti writers tagged spaces to declare their existence, especially in a place like New York City, where it is easy to feel invisible. Some writers who became well known in the early 1970s, like Taki 183, scrawled their names and street numbers all over the city.
During my research, I spoke with one New York graffiti artist whose work had garnered a lot of attention in the 1980s. He explained that his writing had no concrete political messages.
“But,” he added, “the act of writing graffiti is always political.”
Another graffiti artist I interviewed, “PEN1,” stood with me on a street in lower Manhattan, pointing out one of his many works. It was a fill-in – huge letters near the top of a three- or four-story building, very visible from the street.
“Those people have paid so much money to put their message up there,” he said, pointing to nearby billboards, “and I get to put my name up there for free.”
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Through my project, which I ended up titling “Unofficial Communication,” I came to understand that writing graffiti on walls, billboards and subway cars was a way of disrupting ideas of private ownership in public, outdoor spaces.
It involved three different sets of players. There were the taggers, who represented people defying the status quo. There were the public and private owners of the spaces. And there was the municipal government, which regularly cleaned graffiti from outdoor surfaces and tried to arrest taggers.
In cities across the U.S., then and now, it’s easy to see whose interests are the priority, whose mistakes governments are willing to overlook, and which people they aggressively police and penalize.
Loud and clear
The names painted on the Los Angeles skyscrapers are the faster and easier-to-complete fill-ins, since time is at a premium and the artists risk arrest.
These vertical graffiti bombing projects on failed skyscrapers, deliberately or not, call attention to the millions of dollars that are absorbed by taxpayers when private developers make bad investments.
Because the names painted on the buildings are fill-ins, they’re not especially artistic. But they did, in fact, make a political statement.
A former graffiti artist who goes by “ACTUAL” told The Washington Post that he’d come out of retirement to contribute to the Los Angeles project.
“The money invested in [the buildings] could have done so much for this city,” he added.
Some of the graffiti artists in Los Angeles were arrested, and the Los Angeles City Council is demanding that the owners of Oceanwide Plaza remove the graffiti, described as the work of “criminals” acting “recklessly.”
Meanwhile, the developers of buildings that have sat, unfinished, for years, in the middle of a housing crisis, have broken no laws.
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Some reckless acts, apparently, are more criminal than others.
How China cleaned up its air pollution – and what that meant for the climate
How China cleaned up its air pollution: Beijing’s air quality went from hazardous to good while Delhi and Lahore still struggle. Discover how China dramatically reduced pollution since 2013—and why cleaner air may have unintended consequences for global warming and climate change.
Delhi: 442. Lahore: 334. Beijing: 16. These are the levels of PM 2.5, one of the principle measures for air pollution, on November 19. As Pakistanis and Indians struggle with hazardous air quality, in Beijing – a city once notorious for its smog – the air quality is currently rated as good. Ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the Chinese government was so concerned about pollution that it introduced temporary restrictions on cars, shut down factories and stopped work on some construction sites. The measures worked and one study later found that levels of air pollution were down 30% during the period when the temporary Olympic restrictions were in place. It would take a few more years before the Chinese government implemented a clean air action plan in 2013. Since then, China has achieved a dramatic improvement in its air quality. In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to Laura Wilcox, a professor at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading in the UK, to understand how China managed to clean up its air pollution. But Wilcox’s recent research uncovered some unintended consequences from this cleaner air for the global climate: the pollution was actually helping to cool the atmosphere and by taking it away, it may have accelerated global warming. Wilcox explains:
What we’re seeing is a removing of cooling that’s revealing warming that’s already there. So the air pollution isn’t the cause of the warming. It’s just letting us see stuff that we’ve already done.
Dive into “The Knowledge,” where curiosity meets clarity. This playlist, in collaboration with STMDailyNews.com, is designed for viewers who value historical accuracy and insightful learning. Our short videos, ranging from 30 seconds to a minute and a half, make complex subjects easy to grasp in no time. Covering everything from historical events to contemporary processes and entertainment, “The Knowledge” bridges the past with the present. In a world where information is abundant yet often misused, our series aims to guide you through the noise, preserving vital knowledge and truths that shape our lives today. Perfect for curious minds eager to discover the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of everything around us. Subscribe and join in as we explore the facts that matter. https://stmdailynews.com/the-knowledge/
The Hong Kong high-rise fire shows how difficult it is to evacuate in an emergency
Hong Kong High-Rise Fire: The deadly Hong Kong fire exposes critical challenges in evacuating tall buildings. Learn why stair descent is slower than expected, how human behavior causes delays, and what modern safety features can save lives.
Evacuations of high-rises don’t happen every day, but occur often enough. And when they do, the consequences are almost always severe. The stakes are highest in the buildings that are full at predictable times: residential towers at night, office towers in the day. We’ve seen this in the biggest modern examples, from the World Trade Center in the United States to Grenfell Tower in the United Kingdom. The patterns repeat: once a fire takes hold, getting thousands of people safely down dozens of storeys becomes a race against time. But what actually makes evacuating a high-rise building so challenging? It isn’t just a matter of “getting people out”. It’s a collision between the physical limits of the building and the realities of human behaviour under stress.
It’s a long way down to safety
The biggest barrier is simply vertical distance. Stairwells are the only reliable escape route in most buildings. Stair descent in real evacuations is far slower than most people expect. Under controlled or drill conditions people move down at around 0.4–0.7 metres per second. But in an actual emergency, especially in high-rise fires, this can drop sharply. During 9/11, documented speeds at which survivors went down stairs were often slower than 0.3 m/s. These slow-downs accumulate dramatically over long vertical distances. Fatigue is a major factor. Prolonged walking significantly reduces the speed of descent. Surveys conducted after incidents confirm that a large majority of high-rise evacuees stop at least once. During the 2010 fire of a high-rise in Shanghai, nearly half of older survivors reported slowing down significantly. Long stairwells, landings, and the geometry of high-rise stairs all contribute to congestion, especially when flows from multiple floors merge into a single shaft. Slower movers include older adults, people with physical or mobility issues and groups evacuating together. These reduce the overall pace of descent compared with the speeds typically assumed for able-bodied individuals. This can create bottlenecks. Slow movers are especially relevant in residential buildings, where diverse occupants mean movement speeds vary widely. Visibility matters too. Experimental studies show that reduced lighting significantly slows down people going down stairs. This suggests that when smoke reduces visibility in real events, movement can slow even further as people hesitate, misjudge steps, or adjust their speed.
Human behaviour can lead to delays
Human behaviour is one of the biggest sources of delay in high-rise evacuations. People rarely act immediately when an alarm sounds. They pause, look for confirmation, check conditions, gather belongings, or coordinate with family members. These early minutes are consistently some of the costliest when evacuating from tall buildings. Studies of the World Trade Center evacuations show the more cues people saw – smoke, shaking, noise – the more they sought extra information before moving. That search for meaning adds delay. People talk to colleagues, look outside windows, phone family, or wait for an announcement. Ambiguous cues slow them even further. In residential towers, families, neighbours and friend-groups naturally try to evacuate together. Groups tend to form wider steps, or group together in shapes that reduce overall flow. But our research shows when a group moves in a “snake” formation – one behind the other – they travel faster, occupy less space, and allow others to pass more easily. These patterns matter in high-rise housing, where varied household types and mixed abilities make moving in groups the norm.
Why stairs aren’t enough
As high-rises grow taller and populations age, the old assumption that “everyone can take the stairs” simply no longer holds. A full building evacuation can take too long, and for many residents (older adults, people with mobility limitations, families evacuating together) long stair descents are sometimes impossible. This is why many countries have turned to refuge floors: fire- and smoke-protected levels built into towers as safe staging points. These can reduce bottlenecks and prevent long queues. They give people somewhere safe to rest, transfer across to a clearer stair, or wait for firefighters. Essentially, they make vertical movement more manageable in buildings where continuous descent isn’t realistic. Alongside them are evacuation elevators. These are lifts engineered to operate during a fire with pressurised shafts, protected lobbies and backup power. The most efficient evacuations use a mix of stairs and elevators, with ratios adjusted to the building height, density and demographics. The lesson is clear: high-rise evacuation cannot rely on one tool. Stairs, refuge floors and protected elevators should all be made part of ensuring vertical living is safer.Milad Haghani, Associate Professor and Principal Fellow in Urban Risk and Resilience, The University of Melbourne; Erica Kuligowski, Principal Research Fellow, School of Engineering, RMIT University, and Ruggiero Lovreglio, Professor in Digital Construction and Fire Engineering, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey University This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Wishing you all a Happy Thanksgiving! As we gather with loved ones to express gratitude and share a meal, let’s take a moment to appreciate the blessings in our lives. It’s a time to reflect on the goodness that surrounds us and cherish the moments of joy and togetherness. Whether you’re celebrating with family, friends, or even virtually, may this Thanksgiving be filled with warmth, love, and laughter. Let’s remember to extend kindness and lend a helping hand to those in need, spreading the spirit of gratitude and generosity. Enjoy the holiday and create beautiful memories. Happy Thanksgiving!
Rod: A creative force, blending words, images, and flavors. Blogger, writer, filmmaker, and photographer. Cooking enthusiast with a sci-fi vision. Passionate about his upcoming series and dedicated to TNC Network. Partnered with Rebecca Washington for a shared journey of love and art.
Gemma Ware, Host, The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
