Much has been written about Ed Ruscha’s publications. Milestones in the history of postmodern artists’ books, they marked a decisive shift towards industrial offset printing and helped establish the artist’s book as an inexpensive art form. Ruscha’s publications of the 1960s and early 1970s were conceived as conceptual propositions, characterised by the interplay of abundant imagery, minimal captions, and the use of “text-as-image” on their covers. Yet, as simple as their concepts might seem, each book underwent a year-long gestation, as the artist confessed in an interview with Willoughby Sharp for Avalanche in 1973:

“When I did the books, I had a complete feeling of creation in the same sense that a woman would have a child. I even wrote that down: These books are my children.”

Published in an edition of 1,000 copies, Every Building on the Sunset Strip is the only leporello in Ruscha’s body of work. Extending for almost eight metres when unfolded, the book literally documents every building on the Sunset Strip – a stretch of the famous Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, known for its vibrant nightlife and luxury hotels – which became, in the 1960s, a countercultural epicentre of the rock-and-roll revolution:

“Along the top is a montaged view of the street from address numbers 8024 to 9156, while at the bottom, upside down, is a view of the other side of the road from numbers 8101 to 9145, each punctuated by cross streets. Almost the only signs of life are curiously sliced cars that must have moved out of or into the shot between takes,” explains Clive Phillpot in his Catalogue Raisonné (Edward Ruscha: Éditions 1959–1999, Walker Art Center, 1999).

Ruscha’s urban radiography shares affinities with a Japanese publication that, twelve years earlier, documented every building on Ginza Street in Tokyo. Titled Ginza Kaiwai. Ginza Hacchō (1954), this ambitious project by Shōhachi Kimura and Yoshikazu Suzuki was preceded by another curious publication, produced by Il Gazzettino Illustrato in 1931, which documented every palazzo along Venice’s Grand Canal. Ruscha’s book was later followed by a similar editorial radiography of Broadway, made by Jan Henderikse in 1983. Conceived at four different moments in the twentieth century, most probably without awareness of one another, these booklets compress, in their folds, the essence of four cities. In 2023, the artist’s book-related exhibition Folded Cities at Studio 454 in Venice brought these four publications together for the first time, unfolding Ruscha’s concertina alongside the other three.

Yet, no matter how surprisingly similar Every Building on the Sunset Strip is to Ginza Kaiwai. Ginza Hacchō, a conversation between the artist and Phillpot reveals that the publication was, after all, rooted in a fantasy Ruscha had developed as a child:

“In Oklahoma City, I delivered newspapers riding along on my bicycle with my dog… I dreamed about making a model of all the houses on that route, a tiny but detailed model that I could study like an architect standing over a table and plotting a city.”

A couple of decades later, Ruscha drove slowly along the Sunset Strip with a motorized camera, turning his childhood dream into reality some 2,000 kilometres from home.