For this week's Proust Questionnaire, we're talking with the Los Angeles-based architect Eric Owen Moss who admits to relying too much on the enigmatic and (yet) would like to build on the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro or the bottom of the ocean.

Who is your favorite living architect?

The next one, the one I haven't met yet.

Who is your favorite dead architect?

I am waiting for the resurrection.

How would you describe the personality of your practice?

Introverted and simultaneously obstreperous.

What is your practice's main weakness?

Introversion and obstreperousness. 

What is the trait that you appreciate most in a building?

In sight of the invisible meaning something which is not entirely illegible or intelligible but offers the prospect that it might become that.

What is the trait that you deplore most in a building?

Allegiances, ideologies, learned and predictable responses, presuming to know what you can't know, rule-based architecture.

What is the trait that you most appreciate in an architect?

Frankness, curiosity, willingness to say what you might know, willingness to say what you don't know, and probably above all, willingness to build what you don't know and in the process try to find out.

What is trait that you most deplore in an architect?

Routine, predictability, willingness to pontificate. 

What is your favorite type of project to work on?

I think my favorite type of project would be a project that you couldn't name or identify programmatically. 

What does architectural happiness mean?

There is great, great joy and wonder in imagining possibilities and pushing them along as they evolve and then seeing them implemented and the joy of that, but also, the recognition, simultaneously, that inevitably something has been left out and it'll have to be replaced next time around. A sense of being comfortable with being uncomfortable and being happy knowing you never get to the end of this.

What does architectural misery mean?

There are the obvious answers to that: legal ramifications. But I think misery might be accompanied in a way by the prospect of the opposite...and maybe misery points to an opportunity to do something else.

Where would you most like to build (where you haven't already)?

Maybe the bottom of the pacific ocean or the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro. 

What is your favorite color?

It's funny that came up the other day because we did a project a few years ago called the Stealth and the objective was to make a color that was no color. In other words, you couldn't say: I know it, I've seen it. It was actually a combination of plaster and concrete finishes which were black and brown and grey and green and white and then over a period of years, that fluorescence mixed in with it and I think that is my favorite color but it doesn't have a name.

What is your favorite flower?

Van Gogh's Sunflower. 

What is your favorite bird?

Somewhere between the Peacock and a Raven. And one that doesn't exist anymore: the Pterodactyl. 

Who is your favorite poet?

Maybe, T.S. Elliott. 

Who is your favorite artist?

The caves of Lascaux, or Altamira...Chauvet.

When do you lie?

I try not to. Maybe, there are cases where I try to camouflage the nature of the difficulties we have when we build things. 

What talent would you most like to have?

A willingness to walk away from things that haven't worked.

What architectural strategies do you most overuse?

Maybe I overdo the enigma, or the inscrutable, or that line of discussion.

How would you like to die?

In a moment.