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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 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 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...