Eric Owen Moss’ work is eye-popping in the extreme, with a huge range of materials and forms. Just look at some of his buildings in Culver City [all images from his firm’s website]
The Samitaur Tower
The Stealth office building
The Beehive conference center
The Slash/ Backslash building
The Umbrella at the LA Philharmonic
The title of his lecture sponsored by the Art Institute of Chicago’s Architecture and Design Society last week — “Too Much Is Never Enough” — neatly sums it up. On the surface, at least, he’s about as far from the Miesian ideal as you can get.
It would, however, be a big mistake to define Moss merely as “anti-Miesian.” Just about any overview of his output concludes that his work defies categorization: certainly, he doesn’t have a “signature” style, in the manner of, say, Frank Gehry. This doesn’t mean there aren’t consistent philosophical underpinnings to his portfolio.
In his talk, Moss outlined a highly cerebral perspective on the intersection of design and culture. “Culture evolves,” he said. “My interest is in understanding how it moves.”
I have to admit I was pretty confused by it all until I talked to Chicago architect Erol Altay. Maybe I was just dazzled by the visuals — although Moss told us that if we can understand a building just by looking at a photograph, “we’ve made a mistake.”
But I think my problem is that I don’t know philosophy, and certainly not what the current discussion is at influential design academies like SCI-ARC, where Moss is the Director.
As Altay wrote to me in a later email:
I found Moss to be quite straightforward, clear and consistent. In that:
- He started with an argument (his own term) for architecture or an approach to architecture conditioned by an aggressive dialectic. Because he consistently maintained a position that architecture needs something to protest against, and become the antithesis (the anti-thesis) to what is already possible (the thesis), would have me suspect him of being a Marxist: a dialectical materialist (literally). Or at least a Hegelian. (Please look this up if not clear, or read “The Communist Manifesto”).
- Appropriation is at the heart of the matter. How does architecture prevent itself from being not only imitated but trivialized in the process. Moss suggests that partly it is by doing the truly difficult and sometimes risky. Penn Gillette, of magicians Penn and Teller, says that magic should be “beautiful, difficult, and dangerous” (this was in reference to juggling broken bottles of different sizes and weights). The same could apply to Eric Moss’ glass roofs and pillows.
If everybody can do it, today’s avant garde architectural forms become the theatrical storefronts in the mega-malls of tomorrow.
- But Eric Moss is all about appropriation. He points out that the bent glass that they innovated for the LA symphony [which at the time Moss was told simply could not be fabricated] is now sold back to them as a commodity by architectural manufacturers by catalogue. In the same way his own work contains more than echoes of others. The glass corner of “The Box”
is a child of Carlo Scarpa, [we needed] the warped wood joist ceiling of Alvar Aalto before we could model in Rhino, and the exposed studs peeking from behind their sleek wood skin walked in out of Frank Gehry’s house. But this too is a form of defense. It is playing offense.
The architect appropriates himself. The seismic spring base of the mega-mall in Kazahkstan
re-appears as the scaffolding in the Austrian pavilion.
This is a convincing instance where form can be said to be saying something. Architectural meaning is created by repetition of this spiral, self-similar form, taking on different tasks suitable to different purposes or intents. By copying himself, Moss pre-empts imitators.
- There is more than a formal game at play in the work. It is the answer to what is an architectural practice which will move the culture forward. The strategy is to approach projects in ways which are deliberately antithetical to conventional uses of materials and form.
Altay told me not to beat myself up over failing to grasp this intuitively. Although he has been practicing architecture for more than 30 years, he had never gotten a masters degree, so he returned to school and received his M. Arch. from UIC in 2008, and he says it helps to have been recently immersed in the academic environment to comprehend all of this.
In introducing Moss, AIC Curator Zoe Ryan remarked that “Eric leaves things open-ended.” I feel fortunate to have someone like Erol Altay around to help close up the loops for me.
