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Eric Owen Moss’ first LA home relists for $10.95 million

2024-04-25T18:39:00-04:00

Eric Owen Moss’ first residential design in Los Angeles, the 1991 Constellation 167 home in Brentwood, has hit the market courtesy of Sotheby’s International Realty for a listed price of $10.95 million. The home had previously been listed by Compass and Sotheby’s for $12 million last fall before being put up again for the lower price, held exclusively by the latter.

Photo: Wayne Ford, image courtesy Sotheby's International Realty

The 5,476-square-foot design includes four bedrooms and 5 full baths and sits on just a quarter-acre parcel. It has appeared several times in various television shows (R.I.P. Curb Your Enthusiasm) and is distinctive of Moss’ warped style, which was later repeated in 2022’s A+M House. A “comprehensive” series of upgrades and restorations has been performed since it was commissioned, according to Robb Report.

Photo: Wayne Ford, image courtesy Sotheby's International Realty

Moss, who turns 81 this year, recently completed his (W)RAPPER office tower in Culver Ci...

Oliver Wainwright reviews Eric Owen Moss' "menacing" (W)RAPPER office tower

2023-03-20T14:28:00-04:00

The result is a menacing thing, cranking up Moss’s cyberpunk tendencies to new high-octane levels. If ever Hollywood needs a villainous headquarters for a dystopian petrol-guzzling empire, this will be first in line – with a carbon footprint to match.

The Guardian’s Oliver Wainwright spies the limits of LA-brand deconstructivism on a visit to Eric Owen Moss’ (W)RAPPER project in Culver City's Hayden Tract, an “eccentric” assembly of low-rise office buildings the critic says he has helped turn into a warped “exhibition of architectural experimentation.”

Image courtesy Google Street View (February 2023)

Moss brags about the rubberband-like steel exoskeleton that wraps the glass in the city’s second-tallest building enabling a column-free interior while enhancing the imposed verticality and is supposedly inspired by William Butler Yeats and Gustave Courbet, among many other crisscrossing intellectual references. Wainwright, unfazed, drops the dime on its poor sustainability bonafide (to which Moss returns “Is that the only measure of architecture now?”) before critiquing the greatly obstructed views and questioning the promise of so-called “creative office” designs.

Related on Archinect: Eric Owen Moss-designed (W)RAPPER tower has t...

Eric Owen Moss reveals his corner-bending A+M private residence in the Pacific Palisades

2022-07-05T19:31:00-04:00

Eric Owen Moss has shared photos of his self-designed private residence overlooking the coastline on a small 30’ by 50’ plot in Los Angeles’ beach-adjacent Pacific Palisades neighborhood.

The former SCI-Arc Director’s new A+M home is inspired by the Case Study homes published by John Entenza in Arts & Architecture magazine from the mid-1940s through the early-60s and the later direction of Barbara Goldstein, who featured Moss’ early Petal House renovation in that same publication’s pages in 1983.

Image courtesy Eric Owen Moss Architects

Per the architect, the four-story, 1,950-square-foot house is "organized around a central sky-lit atrium that makes the transformation in shape visible on the west side and provides floor-to-ceiling glazing as one makes their way up the stairs on the east side."

Image courtesy Eric Owen Moss Architects

"The perimeter walls of the building are in continuous transformation between the two plan shapes — the roof li...

Eric Owen Moss-designed (W)RAPPER tower has topped out

2021-10-12T17:07:00-04:00

New images released by Urbanize LA reveal that the Eric Owen Moss Architects-designed (W)RAPPER office tower has topped out.

The 17-story, 183,000-square-foot high-rise stands out with its free-form steel exoskeleton that wraps the structure allowing for column-free interiors. The freshly topped-out building in the Baldwin Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, which was originally approved in 1999, stands 230 feet tall. It is reportedly set to be completed in June 2022.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Urbanize LA (@urbanizela)

Affordable housing complex by Eric Owen Moss Architects gets approval in Venice

2021-06-02T17:09:00-04:00

A proposal to build dozens of affordable apartments near Venice Beach has been approved, following a vote taken by the Los Angeles City Planning Commission.

Image: Eric Owen Moss Architects

After a long and contentious public hearing on May 27, the Commission voted to approve the construction of the Reese Davidson Community. The $75 million project is a collaboration between the Venice Community Housing Corp. and the Hollywood Community Housing Corp. It would rise from the site of two current parking lots that flank Venice’s Grand Canal and would consist of a low-rise complex containing 140 apartments, approximately 7,400 square feet of commercial space, and a 360-car parking garage for both residents and visitors. The Reese Davidson Community will house formerly homeless and low-income individuals, as well as some work and live spaces for low-income artists and support staff for tenants. A coffee shop on the ground floor and a 3,000-square-foot performance space and community room w...

Eric Owen Moss wins American Prize for Architecture

2020-11-23T14:18:00-05:00

Prolific Southern California architect Eric Owen Moss was announced as the 2020 laureate of The American Prize for Architecture this morning.

Bestowed jointly by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies, the prize recognizes forty years of contributions Moss' Culver City-based practice has made to Los Angeles and its urban fabric, with buildings such as The Samitaur Tower, The Waffle, The Cactus Tower, and the warehouse renovations, 3555 and Stealth.

"His buildings appear geometrically simple but are infused with theory and purpose," commented architecture critic and President/CEO of The Chicago Athenaeum Christian Narkiewicz-Laine. "His work in his usual and famous Kafkaesque approach simultaneously fosters an insatiable curiosity into what makes him tick; and even more, what makes this ticking turn into such ast...

Eric Owen Moss Architects wins the 2020 AIA Twenty-Five Year Award with Conjunctive Points – The New City

2020-09-08T13:59:00-04:00

Conjunctive Points – The New City, a decades-spanning urban revival plan designed by Eric Owen Moss Architects, has been recognized with the AIA Twenty-five Year Award.

The initiative began in 1986 with selective transformations of former industrial sites and warehouses in the Hayden Tract, a district at the border of Los Angeles and Culver City, ultimately leading to a rejuvenation of the area with a new sense of identity.

Photo: Tom Bonner.

According to the jury verdict, the Eric Owen Moss-designing project "set contemporary standards for adaptive re-use, launched the concept of creative office space, and positioned architecture as a method to uncover new social and civic opportunities."

Photo: Eric Owen Moss Architects.

Contributing to the success of Conjunctive Points – The New City were the land developers Frederick and Laurie Samitaur Smith who had acquired a number of buildings along the tract and, over the course of three decades, worked closely with Moss.

Photo: Tom Bonner.

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Eric Owen Moss-designed (W)RAPPER tower: construction update

2020-06-18T16:35:00-04:00

Six months since we last checked in, the curving steel skeleton of the Eric Owen Moss-designed Wrapper office tower is starting to take shape next to Metro's La Cienega/Jefferson Station in Baldwin Hills.

Designed by Eric Owen Moss Architects, the 17-story (W)RAPPER office tower in Los Angeles generated a stir of reactions among Archinect readers when construction started going vertical in December 2019.

The free-form steel exoskeleton, which appears to be wrapping the structure and enables column-free interiors, is currently going up at the site, according to new construction photos published by Urbanize LA.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Urbanize.LA (@urbanize.la) on Jun 18, 2020 at 9:21am PDT

Eric Owen Moss-designed (W)RAPPER: tower construction goes vertical

2019-12-17T13:45:00-05:00

A year after breaking ground at 5790 W. Jefferson Boulevard, the arrival of a tower crane signals that construction is ramping up at the Eric Owen Moss-designed Wrapper development. The project, located just west of Metro's La Cienega/Jefferson Station, is being developed by Samitaur Constructs - the local real estate investment firm behind a slew of abstract office complexes in Culver City's Hayden Tract.

The exoskeleton wrapping the 17-story tower like giant rubber bands enables the interior spaces to be column-free, some even with double-height ceilings, reports Urbanize LA.

Image: Eric Owen Moss/Zimmerman Visual, via wrappertower.com

Expected to be a key anchor building near LA's La Cienega/Jefferson Metro Station, the 180,548-square-foot (W)RAPPER tower is only a stone's throw away from other Eric Owen Moss-designed developments, like Hayden Tract, Pterodactyl Office, Gateway/Samitaur Tower, and the award-winning restaurant Vespertine in nearby Culver City.

Eric Owen Moss-designed Vespertine wins the 2019 Atmosphere of the Year Award

2019-03-01T15:31:00-05:00

The World Restaurant Awards reviews restaurants all over the world and considers not only food taste and quality but also recognizes the restaurant as a culture. Created by IMG, the awards celebrate establishments in 12 "Big Plate" categories and 6 "Small Plate" categories. This year it has been announced that the Culver City-based restaurant, Vespertine has received the Atmosphere of the Year Award.

Image courtesy of Vespertine

Dining area; Image courtesy of Eric Owen Moss Architects

Nestled within Culver City's Hayden Tract, the restaurant was the vision of Chef Jordan Kahn who collaborated with famed architect Eric Owen Moss. Together, the two helped reimagine and explore new experiences to dining. By blending food, art, music, architecture, and sculpture the restaurant has received public recognition and fame among the Los Angeles food scene.

Vespertine Dish; Image by Anne Fishbein

Orach, caramelized lobster and quince; Image by Anne Fishbein

At first glance, the restaurant's twi...

Eric Owen Moss wins top Austrian honor

2016-07-07T13:17:00-04:00

Very few people have a neutral reaction to Eric Owen Moss: in his conversation and his work, he can be abrasive, challenging, enlightening, and inspirational. For its part, Austria awarded him with its Decoration of Honor for Science and Art on June 21st, celebrating five decades of practice that have produced the Hayden Tract and the Albuquerque Rail Yards Master Plan, among other works.

Culver City's Hayden Tract, which has gradually filled out with Moss' buildings since he was initially commissioned to work on the project in 1991, is arguably one of the most compact yet engrossing architectural walking tours in Los Angeles. Formerly a strip of overlooked industrial warehouses, this part of the city has in the past few decades emerged as a low-slung cultural nexus, rewarding those who take the time to note the unusual and painstakingly rendered structural details. There's a raft of cactuses suspended mid-air, the Cold War afterimage of Stealth, the glass bisected Slash and Backsla...

Take a look at these bold visions for Downtown LA's next park

2016-02-24T14:26:00-05:00

LA has few corners as prominent as First and Broadway. Directly adjacent to the art deco City Hall and across from the LA Times building, the nearly-2 acre lot stands at the center of an increasingly well-trafficked pedestrian area. Now, some of the biggest names in town are competing to transform the lot into a bold new park.

After a wider call for proposals, the LA Bureau of Engineering, in conjunction with the Mayor's Office, announced a shortlist of finalists late last year: AECOM, Brooks + Scarpa Architects, Eric Owen Moss Architects, and Mia Lehrer + Associates in collaboration with OMA. Each practice was given six weeks to produce a design, which are currently of public view.

Soon, the City will announce the winners of the competition, following input from the public, and then will proceed to finalize the designs.

Since the new park abuts the larger Grand Park (designed by Rios Clementi Hale Studios), it needs to both stand out as a unique design and seamlessly mesh with the exi...

"whether you can institutionalize a kind of anti-institutional message, we will see": Eric Owen Moss reflects on 14 years as SCI-Arc's director

2015-09-14T18:54:00-04:00

One of the things that we learned about SCI-Arc was that at the level of ideas, of thinking, of adventure, of imagination, of discovery ... they need accoutrements. They need support, they need tools to be realized in the world. [...] So we looked at the situation in terms of ideas — design ideas, imaginative students, creative faculty — and we had to give them the tools to implement, meaning to draw, to model what they wanted, and to make that information then available on the outside.

Eric Owen Moss is being succeeded by Hernan Diaz Alonso, who began serving as Director of SCI-Arc earlier this summer. You can find out more about Diaz Alonso's role in our Deans List feature.

Eric Owen Moss Bids "Not Farewell But Fare Forward" at SciArc

2015-03-25T12:11:00-04:00

“I’m the ENEMY!” Moss hollered as he stepped onto the dais in front of a packed hall at SCI-Arc, awaiting his final address as dean last Thursday. Moss might as well have said, “This is Cinerama,” as the single projection that had backgrounded the introductory remarks dramatically opened into three-synced projections producing a single, massive image that stretched along the entirety of the wall. A cartoon monkey is startled by his reflection and the text above reads, “We have met the enemy and he is u̶s̶ me."

Before Moss began his lecture, aptly titled “Not Farewell but Fare Forward,” Tom Gilmore and Hernan Diaz Alonso delivered laudatory introductions. Gilmore described Moss as alternating between Don Quixote and his sidekick Sancho Panza, the first in a series of references to Cervantes’ work, apparently something that Moss has himself cultivated in prior talks. Alonso, who will succeed Moss as dean of the school, attempted to provide “20 seconds [of] touch-touchy feely-feely,” ...

Improvisation and Troublemaking: Frank Gehry in Conversation with Eric Owen Moss at SCI-Arc

2015-03-16T14:16:00-04:00

Despite making recent news for a particularly antisocial public display, Frank Gehry remains a highly influential and crowd-drawing figure, as evidenced by SCI-Arc’s completely full Keck Lecture Hall over an hour before Gehry took the stage on Wednesday, March 4, for a lecture with Eric Owen Moss.

The lecture was the last in a series of five annual lectures honoring late SCI-Arc faculty Raimund Abraham, and opened with memorial remembrances of Abraham by Moss and Gehry. The lecture, “You Can’t Rehearse Something You Haven’t Invented Yet”, was a quote Gehry supplied to Moss from jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter. The improvisational quality of Jazz as it relates to Gehry’s process of design was a major thread through the talk. Gehry related the actors required to produce a building – client, contractor, project manager (“we don’t really need those guys though” he quipped), building department, and bank – to the constraining three notes around which an improvisational jazz composition wou...

Geniuses, money and monuments: Weekly News Round-Up for September 15, 2014

2014-09-22T20:47:00-04:00

Saturday, September 20

NYC's historic 190 Bowery part of massive buy-up by developer RFR Holdings: RFR plans to spend upwards of $900M on property and land purchases by the end of 2014. One of its recent buys included the former "72-room bohemian dream house" at 190 Bowery.

Friday, September 19

MacArthur Fellow Rick Lowe Reclaims Urban Neighborhoods Through Art: Lowe is currently a resident at Philadelphia's Pearl Street Project, which aims at making dimly-lit alleyways more safe. He is also the founder of Houston's Project Row Houses.
Zaha Hadid launches luxury homeware range with Harrods: Pieces include a £9,999 serving platter, £43 cups and saucers, and £4,860 Field of Towers chess set.
Archinect is at the Salk Institute, covering the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture Conference: The three-day conference focused on topics in neuroscientific research that serve the architecture profession, including advances in mobile brain-computing interfaces and the neurological data behind...

Hernan Diaz Alonso to follow Eric Owen Moss as Director of SCI-Arc, + Deans List sneak peek

2014-09-17T21:05:00-04:00

I am pleased that the SCI-Arc Board of Trustees at its quarterly meeting [on Wednesday, September 10] approved the contract with Hernan Diaz Alonso as the next Director of SCI-Arc. Hernan will assume this role beginning September 2015.

Hernan Diaz Alonso's appointment had been percolating since the beginning of the summer, when SCI-Arc's search committee first recommended him for the position after also considering professor Wes Jones. Diaz Alonso will take up the directorship at a pivotal point in SCI-Arc's history in relation to the city of Los Angeles, succeeding Eric Owen Moss' thirteen-year service which solidified the school's position in the now rapidly-developing Arts District of downtown LA.

Aside from serving academic and administrative roles at SCI-Arc since 2001, Diaz Alonso is also principal of LA-based Xefirotarch, a multidisciplinary practice that won MoMA PS1's Young Architects Program in 2005. He will also serve as Yale University's Eero Saarinen Professor of Architectural Design in Spring 2015.

Before Diaz Alonso's role was made public, we spoke with him for our Deans List series, focusing on his plans for managing SCI-Arc's evolution in the midst of a rapidly changing Los Angeles. Here are a few t...

Sylvia Lavin & Eric Owen Moss Butt Heads at SCI-Arc Discussion

2013-08-07T18:58:00-04:00

Well, it is the prerogative of men to enter the world without acknowledging that they are men. - Sylvia Lavin

Watching Sylvia Lavin and Eric Owen Moss in conversation at SCI-Arc last night, prolific Archinect blogger Lian Chang took careful note of a few key impasses -- where Lavin and Moss either failed to see eye-to-eye, or artfully dodged one another's argumentative traps. Lavin, an imposing academic presence as the Director of the Critical Studies MA/PhD for UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design, set out to engage Moss, world-renowned architect and current SCI-Arc director, on architectural agency and pedagogy. When the architect’s reach is so far and deep, what is their responsibility to their environment, both physically and temporally? On a more psychological (and abstract) level, how does the architect’s memory of their past serve their present understanding?

To pose these questions, Lavin presented the audience with a few (now nearly nauseatingly ubiquitous, at least in Los Angeles) photos: of Moss on the beach, and in a collection of contemporaries’ portraits. ...

Eric Owen Moss will be a guest on HuffPost Live today at 3:30 PST to discuss cities

2013-05-14T17:59:00-04:00

Eric Moss gets to play a real-life game of Sim City. The architect's 1986 master plan for Culver City proposed 43 buildings and half are completed today. Eric joins us along with others from across the country to discuss urban revitalization.