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AIMING ONWARD: A PROFILE ON ERIC OWEN MOSS Benjamin J. Smith
—You saw it visibly from your hidingplace? —No. From my invisibly lyingplace. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake No Matter what instruments he uses, at some point he reaches the edge of certainty beyond which conscious knowledge cannot pass. Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols ERIC OWEN MOSS has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of California at Los Angeles and holds Masters degrees in Architecture from both the University of California at Berkeley, College of Environmental Design and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Eric Owen Moss Architects was founded in 1973, and has garnered over 100 local, national, and international design awards. Moss has held teaching positions at major universities around the world including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, University of Applied Arts in Vienna, and the Royal Academy in Copenhagen. He was honored as the 2006 AIA/LA Educator of the Year. Moss received the Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999, and the AIA/LA Gold Medal in 2001. In 2007, he was awarded the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize, recognizing a distinguished history of architectural design, and in 2011 he was honored with the Jencks Award by RIBA.
1. (W)rapper, Los Angeles, Eric Owen Moss Architects. 2. Pterodactyl, Culver City, Eric Owen Moss Architects. 3. Moss speaks at SCI-Arc’s 2009 Graduation Ceremony. 4. Hernan Diaz Alonso, Peter Noever, Eric Owen Moss, Wolf D. Prix and Thom Mayne at the Venice Biennale 2010. 5. Moss and his son Miller at Alexis Rocha’s 2010 SCI-Arc Gallery exhibit, Still Robot. 6. Samitaur Tower, Culver City, Eric Owen Moss Architects.
Making and making Succeeding and failing. Doing. Figuring. Disentagling the tangle of conventions. Move. Moving forward. Backward. Sideways. Slipping, finding ground. Not static. Learning at an edge. Which today, tomorrow? Not yesterday. The next. The next move. Eric Owen Moss is at home with architecture, is at home at SCI-Arc. His pervasive involvement with SCI-Arc witnessed his development from a young and audacious faculty member to its leader with a strong voice. He first started teaching at SCI-Arc in 1974 and became the school’s fourth director in 2002. Eric’s relationship with SCI-Arc began two years after the school opened, which sets him apart from its founding but has allowed him to engage the pedagogy over the past 40 years with a critical gaze that is able to reflect on and challenge the school’s history. With a specific aim at reflexive momentum he has established a vision for SCI-Arc to seek and to do. I am honored to write this piece about Eric for the SCI-Arc Magazine—to write about someone who has profoundly impacted the development of architecture in Los Angeles and the progress of SCI-Arc. The audience for this magazine has participated in Eric’s story and make this endeavor no small task. His persona in the world of architecture is far reaching and the success of his career as an architect and academic is undeniable. Finding it nearly impossible to start this article without referencing James Joyce, the two quotes above are meant as a suggestion to think about Eric and his sensibility. One, opening the intuitive dreamer’s struggle to visualize what is in their mind, the other, grounding the fortuitous moment when creativity and curiosity eclipse knowledge. In 1978, when Eric was 35 years old, he received his first Progressive Architecture award for the Morgenstern Warehouse, garnering praise from Charles Moore who said the project was “unusually spirited”1—a remark that is indicative of a time where Moore’s own flamboyant Piazza d’Italia was completed in the same year. Eric’s early houses acquired significant attention, landing covers on prominent international journals like GA Houses and seminal exhibition catalogs such as Los Angeles Now. Projects 11
like Fun House, Petal House, and the Pinball House embodied the complexity of a distinct Los Angeles Postmodernism—an emblematic charisma that provoked Charles Jencks to write about Eric’s work in a 1983 article featured in AA Files that first posited an LA School. Jencks wrote of Eric’s projects embracing an LA Style, stating, “all the clashes and intersections are here: on the one hand a perfect expression of the laid back Angeleno with his shoes off, drink in hand, contemplating the next way he can extend his personal fulfillment, and on the other hand a free celebration of architectural motifs.”2 This aesthetic, working toward an ambition that could also be described as the precision of casual indifference, succeeds at critiquing the Los Angeles vernacular through a rigorous study that looks effortless with backhanded playfulness. Eric transformed the identity of Culver City through a collection of bold and confident architecture. In contrast to the witty levity, demonstrated by his early houses, the later projects in Culver City articulate heavy brooding mass. Blocks carve, boxes tumble, cylinders torque, glass warps. Eric’s next challenge is to build a new tower in Culver City, Wrapper, that will require a revision of building codes by the way it moves its structure to the skin through an eccentric network of ribbons, revealing bound exhibitionism. I was recently shown a photograph by Jeff Kipnis of a curb detail that Harry Cobb took when he visited Eric’s project, Pterodactyl. Jeff remarked that of all of the more obvious moments that could have been photographed, this particular detail was the one that Harry identified as the sign of an architect. The photograph signaled the simultaneity of finesse and disruption, a continuity that feels inappropriate. My intuitive response to the photograph immediately gravitated toward a connection between that detail and Eric’s book, Gnostic Architect. In the book, Eric writes about his fascination of fit and misfit in Henry Moore’s Helmet. The book, in its own right, takes on that theoretical intention. As a designed object, it does not sit silently. It communicates with a simple and deliberate move that activates it and its context. With a diagonal slice at its base that moves upward ½ inch from left to right, the book rotates just under 3 degrees when it slides onto a shelf, giving it a curious and uncomfortable disposition in relation to the other books. Organized chronologically relative to some of Eric’s other books, Buildings and Projects 2 and Buildings and Projects 3, puts the three in an awkward tension. The perplexing question that is raised is “how does this book get positioned on the shelf?” Constantly, it wavers between the binding sloping inward at its top or jutting outward at its base. The inability for the book to resolve a parallel line, to make its binding line up relative to other objects in its context is maddening, but provides a perverse satisfaction. The first time seeing Eric on a review at SCI-Arc has imprinted a distinct memory. As a first year M.Arch student watching a review for an upper level graduate studio I was intimidated by the hardline questions Eric asked. I do not recall the project or the specific contents of the discussion, but what I do remember is feeling the intensity of a powerful conversation. Eric maintained a course of asking challenging questions, seeking thoughtful responses from the students, even when they were not possible. What I learned about Eric from that moment, and from watching him in subsequent reviews and discussions, was that Eric asks difficult questions out of a deep respect for architecture and for the people who enter into its discourse. What I naively felt then, as a sharp contrast between us-and-them, grew to a clearer understanding of
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