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Reshaping Architecture's Language
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19875 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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4 / 1992 |
1,945 Words |
| Author
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Judith Bell
Judith Bell is an art historian and novelist based in
Arlington, Virginia. |
Los Angeles-based architect Eric Owen Moss, forty-eight, is tired of being known as an enfant terrible, a title that has stuck from the early years of his career when he admits he was "trying to clear the decks a bit". That "clearing" involved coming to terms not only with the work of his predecessors (which ones to fight) but with the accepted vocabulary of architecture itself (what to fight about). "My initial reaction was to try to free myself from those things", says Moss, "to position myself to have freedom from in order to have freedom to".
To reshape the language of architecture? "That's the job", says Moss, "the only job. You have to try to do that. Whatever has a kind of history that preexists as the nomenclature of architecture is anathema to me. What I won't do, is acknowledge those rules--this is a door, this is a wall, this is a roof, this is a column--except as a kind of antirule. I see a tension between order and collapse that is in direct opposition to the scientific positivism that says that the world and everything in it is amenable to a kind of rational analysis and explanation. Whether I'm successful or not, maybe somebody else should say".
That somebody else is perhaps rather something else-a sudden boon in built buildings for an architect who has spent a number of years short on the actualized projects that would put his well-developed theories to the test. The stunning rehab of a number of factories and warehouse spaces in Culver City follow on the heels of Moss' innovative design for a new housing office at the University of California at Irvine. These projects, several of which have won National Honor Awards from the AIA, reveal a continually evolving a esthetic where manipulations of geometry and space and innovative combinations of unexpected materials are not only invigorating and arresting but adaptable and negotiable. But more importantly, they alert us to a new voice. Not only attuned to the uncertainty inherent in life in the late twentieth century, but discovering therein an impetus for new forms that are integrated and uplifting, Moss, the ultimate questioner, may be on to something big.
Moss was born and raised in Los Angeles, a city, he notes, without a Champs Elysees, or a Palazzo by Raphael, or even a downtown. "Los Angeles just goes and goes", says Moss. "It doesn't know how to have limits, how to establish the boundaries that make the world intelligible and ultimately real; it's a failure as a city. To some extent, my expression is abetted or aided if not engendered by working in this city that is not a
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