ARCHITECTURE : Marlboro Man Billboard Stands as Image of Our Episodic Culture

Sunset Boulevard marches along for miles at the top of the Los Angeles grid. Then it suddenly hits the foothills of the Hollywood Hills, curves, climbs and transforms itself into the Sunset Strip, which for half a century has snaked its way from the city line to the manicured probity of Beverly Hills.

And there, standing watch over all manner of urban ebullience stands the Marlboro Man.

Almost 60 feet tall, he towers over all his neighbors, standing over the West Hollywood ridges as if they were the endless plains of Texas. A billboard He-Man that is a more enduring urban monument than almost any other building in Los Angeles, the Marlboro Man has transcended the realm of pure advertising to become one of the most effective landmarks in the confusing landscape of our city.

The site of the Marlboro Man has long been the location of advertisements, ranging from a mundane succession of rectangular billboards to a rotating picture of a woman, but this particular evocation of the rugged lifestyle that is supposed to be associated with smoking a particular kind of cigarette has lasted on this location for years.

It is an especially effective image because the figure is cut out to form the actual billboard, so that the man appears to be standing on Sunset Boulevard, rather than existing as a framed picture of another place. He is larger than anything around, joining the scale of the Chateau Marmont hotel just to the north and the few office buildings that rise out of the generally one- to two-story scale of the Strip.

He does have his limitations: He is a one-sided chimerical image that remains as a reference point when approached from the east but disappears into a dark network of structure when seen from the west. Moreover, he is there to promote an activity that many of us find objectionable and does so through the evocation of a surrealistically different landscape from the one he inhabits.

It is, in fact, the limited, unrooted and absolute clarity of the Marlboro Man that makes him so effective. The Los Angeles area is not very good at using buildings to mark significant spots in its geography or in conveying important messages. For instance, the city of West Hollywood erected a tiny little wall at the base of the Marlboro Man welcoming passersby to their city. The puniness of this gesture and the complete banality of all the surrounding architecture make the vividness of the Marlboro Man all the more effective.

One is reminded of our other great sign, the former real estate advertisement that has become the international symbol of its namesake, Hollywood. Both have reduced the idea of urban identity to the status of pure sign, created by forces that are neither public nor primarily interested in interpreting the reality of our city. They are, however, both effective monuments to an era in which we receive much of our information from television, for a culture in which all times and all places are available on stage sets and for a city whose overall coherence has been transformed into the episodic landscape created by the automobile: The Marlboro Man says it all quickly in a visually arresting manner. He floats above us, slightly absurd, without past or future but providing us with just enough of a sign to lead us to greener pastures without ever leaving West Hollywood.