“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,” to express his admiration for Moss, but it only seemed to last about six. Like Gilmore, Alonso referenced Don Quixote, this time in connection to the Spanish game mus, incidentally invented contemporaneously with Cervantes’ life, and which requires players to announce their intention to either win or lose before the game commences. In both introductions, admiration for Moss was conveyed with equal measure of irreverence and humor, appropriate for an architect who has created a brand rooted in a particular conception of rebellion, of being in relation to “the enemy.”

“‘The culture’ has its rules, its pro forma, its methods and its systems,” Moss began. The architect always arrives to a context that has been a priori structured according to various systems and rules. In Moss’ view, the job of the architect is to counter this, to resist it. Moss started his talk by relating the degree to which this idea has been present throughout his career. Displaying a critical self-awareness, he seemed to sincerely question the viability of his continual assumption of the role, now that he has become a well-established architect. Worried about the potential for self-assurance to translate into “conceptual complacency,” Moss stated his intent to “follow the conviction that I have and at the same time mistrust it.” Otherwise, he risks becoming “the target that I’m admonishing you to be wary of.” This set the tone of the night’s lecture, in which Moss attempted to disrupt the tone of the usual farewell address by a continued insistence that he was not settling down and neither will his work.

Images kept passing along the wall, serving as reference points for Moss’ enunciations. First: the cover of a recent issue of Charlie Hebdo. Without expressing allegiance to the ideological actuality of the French magazine, he declared the importance of “tenacity” and “resilience” which are necessary to oppose those who in “tyrannical, cultural, political ways… are trying to cover the world with concrete.” “Concrete always cracks,” Moss stated. Resistance emerges from these cracks. The next slide included an image of Albrecht Dürer’s Apocalypse, which he called a “shared story” that could be read as well by us as by someone in 16th Germany; a painting by Juan Gris, which expresses “the privatization of content”; a photograph of phobos, the asteroid that defies expectations of extraterrestrial bodies and suggests that “maybe science isn’t the shared story either.” This was all to say, we now live in a world without recourse to shared narratives.

Moss kept going, slide after slide, proclamation after proclamation. A painting by Lucian Freud led to the assertion that architecture can be autobiographical. A map of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake served as an example of self-questioning in an artwork, and was related to the type of “investigational architecture” he advocates (and mentioned later, in passing, during his lecture). Later, a clip from the 1928 film “The Wind” by Victor Sjöström played that showed a horse galloping among clouds. For Moss, the film redefined “the meaning of the wind,” saying the “wind is a horse in the sky.” The architect declared, “To invent the circumstances of, instead of accommodate the circumstances, would be the aspiration.” 

“My dad was a writer,” Moss told the audience. “When he wasn’t writing he was making lists.” Following in his father’s footsteps, Moss has a list of his own: unending, continuously added to and subtracted from. A series of strange little objects passed across the screen to a rhythmic, ambient soundtrack like something from a commercial advertising a new lifestyle gadget. The images were indeed beautiful: assemblages of foam and springs, wood composite models, a series of pebbles (incidentally, they also bear more than a passing resemblance to the artist Gabriel Orozco’s Asterisms series). Like the stream of images, Moss contends that his work is an “aggregate process,” in which “buildings are only buildings, per se, but aggregates” which together constitute a singular work that, like his list, is unending. He then proceeded to screen a similar video, but this time with images of his (and his firm’s) work. This deferral of any end or limit seemed a major theme of the night. Moss expresses a virulent refusal of teleology: he delights in the long-process of a site’s development, the capacity to return to a work and add to it, the establishment of parts rather than wholes, and the multiplication of sometimes unwieldy juxtapositions of program. When discussing both past projects, like in Culver City, or ongoing projects like his renovation of La Térmica in Barcelona, Moss seemed adamant on presenting them as dynamically different than other architecture. Within the context of a farewell address, Moss made every effort to “fare forward,” while simultaneously performing the too-familiar role of the established architect reminiscing.

“I want to give you a new theory of urbanism,” Moss stated before discussing his massive urbanism project in Nanjing, China. “Not so much what it is, but why it is.” He showed the audience images of the earth, the sky, the sea, cities of “method,” cities of “redundancies.” For Moss, the city has no intrinsic meaning. “Cities are made by us to give our lives a story and we develop our lives in the context of the city,” he said. Moss went over  the various parts of the project; the diverse programming included in different components in which “nothing is only what it is”; the connection of these parts in a way in which “infrastructure becomes cohesive not divisive.” This is to say, the project is huge and its components, while resembling much of his other work in form, will be able to act in ways that are only possible within the tabula rasa presented by post-WWII Nanjing. Moss attempted to conceptually bridge this project with his firm’s older and on-going work in Culver City, which have a deserved reputation for helping to reinvent this region in Los Angeles.

Eric Owen Moss has an impressive capacity to cite and to reference, which automatically makes his lectures stand out from the stream of the typical showcase of an architect’s work. Together with his vociferous attempts to assert his radicality, Moss can be quite convincing. He takes pride in his capacity to adapt, his perhaps adventurous affirmation of the accidental and the experimental. It is among these qualities, assumedly, that a comparison can be made between him and Cervantes’ character who saw giants where windmills stood. 

But there is another side to Moss: the man who worries about his own capacity to become “the enemy,” who attempts to defer the telos of his oeuvre by assuming a framework oriented around the aggregate and the durational. Yet lurking behind this refusal of telos is a, perhaps unconscious, obsession with the teleology of novelty, an incessant need to stake himself as innovative. It recalls the endless series of neo-’s, anti-’s and post-’s that have driven and defined cultural production for at least the last two centuries. Newness remains staked against that which came before: a simultaneous rejection of the old is accompanied by an insidious desire to be placed alongside it. This is the shadowy grand narrative that often belies attempts to stake one’s own work as outside of, freed from, “the grand narratives” of modernity. For Moss, the “enemy” is that which comes before, he who imposes the Law. Yet, simultaneously, Moss cannot help but draw lines of filiality and inheritance, assumedly to place himself within a canonized context. At the end of his talk, he showed a painting by Giorgio Di Chirico in juxtaposition with the façade of one of his own buildings. “A hundred years apart” he stated. “And contemporaries.” 

In an essay, the novelist Milan Kundera writes about the “depreciated legacy” of Cervantes. For Kundera, Cervantes’ legacy is nothing less than the modern novel and the ambiguities it can convey. Can any architecture be compared accurately to Cervantes or his characters? Ambiguity rendered in built form is much different than the ambiguity a novel can convey. Partially, this is because architecture asserts a metaphysics of presence, a here and nowness even as it is added to that is outside of the intention of the architect, even if he conceives of it as part of an unfinished aggregate. It seems that it is only the architect and his thoughts that could be quixotic. In the context of Eric Owen Moss, his expressed adherence to ambiguity ends as he produces his own brand, endeavors to cultivate the legacy that he desires to be perceived.

Near the end of Kundera’s essay, the novelist writes, “Once upon a time I too thought that the future was the only competent judge of our works and actions. Later on I understood that chasing after the future is the worst conformism of all, a craven flattery of the mighty. For the future is always mightier than the present. It will pass judgement on us, of course. And without any competence.”