19586 New Forms Taschen 033

A third SCI-Arc faculty member of interest is Erie Owen Moss. Born in Los Angeles in 1943, educated at UCLA, he opened his own office in Culver City in 1976, and a peculiarity of his work is that most of it is situated in that area of the city. Through his affiliation with a developer based in Culver City, located midway be-tween downtown Los Angeles and Santa Monica, Moss has had the opportunity to build complexes that incrementally connect together, such as the Paramount Laundry-Lindblade Tower-Cary Group Complex, completed between 1987 and 1990. Morę recent rehabilitation of these large warehouse-type structures, origi-nally built for the movie industry, includes The Box and IRS buildings, located nearby. Making very inventive use of common materials such as sewer pipes serving as columns, or bolts bent in a U shape to form a fluorescent light fixture, Moss has managed to create an impetus for forward-looking advertising or recording compa-nies to install themselves in an area that was all but abandoned a few years ago. The architect Philip Johnson has dubbed him "the jeweler of junk." Like Mayne, Moss projects an intensely intellectual approach to his designs, relating them to his un-derstanding of the State of the world in an interesting manner. As Moss says, "T.S. Eliot wrote about 'the still point of the turning world.' Lao Tse wrote about 'the square with no corners.' You can't have a square with no corners, can you? If a build-ing represents fixity, then it represents a particular condition or an understanding at a particular point in time. But if the architecture itself could include oppositions, so that the building itself as an aspiration was about movement or the movement of ideas, then it might be morę durable. It would embody something that would move notwithstanding the fact that it represents something which physiologically is fixed."⁹ This theoretical stance is given form in an architecture that conserves reminiscences of its own design process, as is the case in the 1993 Lawson-Westen House, in the fashionable Brentwood section of Los Angeles. Like The Box, this resi-dence pursues nothing else than a redefinition of architectural space. Perhaps less

Pages36/37 Asymptote Steel Cloud West Coast Gateway.

Los Angeles, California,

1988 (project)

The winning design in the 1988 Los Angeles Gateway Competition, as yet unbuilt, was submitted by the young New York architects Lise Annę Couture and Hani Rashid. Their 500 m linear structure was intended to cross an eight-lane freeway. A monument in the Deconstructivist style, it did cali attention to the possible uses for vast underoccupied areas in a city that is dominated by automobiles.

36 INTRODUCTION