When students, faculty and staff walk into Wallis Annenberg Hall, they are greeted with a 31-by-16-foot LED media wall complete with a mosaic of newscasts, rolling X feeds and Annenberg-related news.
The media wall, and heartbeat of Wallis Annenberg Hall, has a $600,00 price tag. Whether you work in the Media Center on the first floor or study on the fourth floor, the wall catches your attention.
Today, ‘studying at Annenberg’ is a phrase that USC students know refers to Wallis Annenberg Hall, but just ten years ago, the Hall didn’t exist.
Back in 2008, “the school was going through exponential growth. We began to look at what makes sense for the future of the school in terms of programming, facilities and demands for creating additional student opportunities,” said James Vasquez, USC Annenberg’s Associate Dean of Operations.
While the conceptual development for the building began in 2008, the project took off in 2010 when USC received a $50 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation, Wallis Annenberg and the Annenberg family, according to Vasquez.
(Video courtesy of Charles ‘Chuck’ Boyles)
The main inspiration for the building’s forum was the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University.
“It’s a tall open atrium space that has seating on multiple levels that can look down on events. But the great thing about it is that it’s a multi-purpose space,” said Brent Miller, Managing Principal at HED, an architecture firm responsible for Wallis Annenberg Hall’s design.
While it was still open and operating, architects, Annenberg faculty members and staff also toured the Newseum in Washington, DC.
“When you walk into the Newseum, they had a two-story video wall, but it’s really more of a projection screen,” said Vasquez, “We walked into there, and we said, we want that somewhere.”
Wallis Annenberg Hall, and the forum in particular, was built on the principles of versatility and innovation, according to Miller.
The forum gives Annenberg “the flexibility to do these programs that I think make Annenberg unique, where they bring in speakers for students, faculty and staff to really get engaged,” said Miller. “That was a lot of the impetus behind the way we designed the forum and specifically with the media wall that’s behind it, because it is ultimately a flexible component that lets you do lots of things.”
Many know the media wall for its wide array of content, but when Wallis Annenberg Hall opened in September 2014, the wall displayed a picture collage, according to USC Annenberg’s former director of media technologies Charles ‘Chuck’ Boyles.
“You want to grab people’s attention. You want to give them something visual to look at,” said Boyles. “The original display system that we had for the wall was very static, and I wanted some movement. So I really pushed for something new about a year or so after.”
In 2015, Boyles, in collaboration with Vasquez and USC Annenberg, upgraded the wall with the purchase of a Christie Spyder, a multi-window processor.
The spyder allowed Boyles to create the screen we see today with what he calls a “social media waterfall” on the left side of the screen, a news broadcast that changes channels on the bottom of the screen and Annenberg-related information at the top.
The spyder also allows for the display of live content and events.
“One of the biggest events I recall supporting in that environment was the first Clinton-Trump debate. I mean, that place was a zoo. It was beyond capacity, and the energy in the room was overwhelming,” he said.
The media wall at Wallis Annenberg Hall represents the power of information and technology, but it is also meant to support the journalistic work completed in the building each day, according to Boyles.
“Getting the Media Center content up on that wall was always a priority: to showcase and help expose others to the great work that’s being done in the Media Center,” said Boyles.