Ocean Way Towers
Ocean Way Towers is a site-specific sculpture conceived as both an architectural intervention and a temporal instrument. Suspended above a historic private residence, the tower resonates with space, place, and time. It is simultaneously a beacon—visible from canyon ridges, the Pacific Coast Highway, and the Pacific Ocean—and an immersive chamber where light, geometry, and memory collapse into a singular experience.
Nestled below the ridges of the Santa Monica Mountains and overlooking the ocean, the tower inhabits a liminal zone between house and horizon. Detached from the residence, it creates a threshold into another realm: a space for immersion, reflection, and altered perception.
Thousands of geometric metal cells form a shimmering lattice that oscillates between opacity and transparency. By day, the tower refracts sunlight into kaleidoscopic fragments, shifting with weather and time. By night, it becomes a luminous clockwork. At 8:45 pm, a concealed LED system cycles through minute-long transitions, from silver-blue to violet to deep reddish-blue, before extinguishing into darkness. This ritual resets time perception, heightening spatial memory and transforming the structure into a marker of passage.
Project Size
300 sf
Location
Santa Monica, CA
Hollywood Myths, Extreme Feats, Lasting Influence
The residence that anchors the tower carries its own mythos. Built in 1926 by Hollywood director Edmund Goulding—celebrated, notorious, and dubbed the “Bad Boy Genius”—the house was long a stage for boundary-pushing lifestyles, artistic experimentation, and eccentric excess.
Ocean Way Towers extends this layered legacy. It is born from three intersecting inspirations: Goulding’s radical defiance of convention, Nyíregyházi’s transcendent chaos-into-order artistry, and Pettijohn’s relentless endurance in extreme conditions. Together, they shape a structure that honors the past while projecting future aspiration.
A Time Capsule of Light and Reflection
Visitors ascend a circular stair into a suspended super-cube lined with 3,000 marine-grade aluminum extrusions arranged in fragmented pixelation. Apertures frame fleeting views of ocean and mountain, while reflective surfaces distort and multiply them. The geometry creates a paradox of compression and vastness, intimacy and immensity.
The tower functions as a contemporary time capsule. It collects the energies of past, present, and future inhabitants, creating a continuum of memory and projection. Light and shadow blur temporal boundaries, binding visitors to the layered history of the house, the immediacy of the present, and imagined futures yet to come.
A Sculpture as Architecture, a Clock as Space
Fabricated in New York, the 2,000 pounds of aluminum were digitally modeled, preassembled, and trucked across the country before being hand-carried three flights into the tower. The painstaking assembly became an act of endurance and precision, mirroring the pursuits of the client, Karl Pettijohn, an art patron and extreme athlete who has climbed the highest peaks on seven continents.
The geometry itself was inspired by Hungarian pianist Ervin Nyíregyházi, whose performances erupted in chaos before resolving into structured harmony. Similarly, the tower’s fragmented pixelation embodies the rhythm of chaos transforming into order—an architectural composition where balance emerges from fracture.
The tower is a modern clockwork: a luminous marker of time, memory, and endurance. At night, its glow has become an event visible from the beach, the Pacific Coast Highway, and the mountain ridges—a beacon that transcends private ownership to resonate across the community.
Ultimately, Ocean Way Towers is an homage to suspension—of body, of light, of memory, of time itself. It embodies the human desire to push beyond boundaries, capturing the oscillation between chaos and clarity, past and future, earth and sky.
