Q: What does the director of SCI-Arc do?
A: Not a goddam thing. That's why I'm never here.
Moss interview in the LA Downtown News.
Designs on Downtown
SCI-Arc Director Eric Owen Moss on the School, That Pesky Lot, and How Nowhere Becomes Somewhere
by Jon Regardie
One thing about Eric Owen Moss: The man can talk. Give him a chance and he goes on and on, sometimes answering what he is asked, and often not. Like many politicians and some creative types, he seems fascinated by his own ideas, by his solutions to problems and his role in finding the answers. During an interview with the Los Angeles Downtown News, while discussing how the Southern California Institute or Architecture (SCI-Arc), where Moss works part-time as director, sends students around the globe to study, he says, "There are places all over the world that are very interested in that exchange. I participate in that, although I would be talking probably anyway because I can't shut up."
The fact that Los Angeles native Moss, 61, is so talkative will serve him well this week, when he delivers a Feb. 23 lecture at the school titled "Confrontation and Withdrawal." Included in the subject matter will be the area around SCI-Arc. It is of particular interest, considering that last year SCI-Arc failed to secure an adjacent lot and two developers broached plans to build on it. Rumors flew that SCI-Arc, which arrived Downtown in 2000, and transformed a defunct railroad building into an industrial-flavored hive for some 500 architecture students and faculty, might leave the community. Moss will also discuss his own work as head of the firm Eric Owen Moss Architects.
"It's important for students and faculty to hear me talking about subjects that I'm doing," says Moss, a sneakered foot propped on a chair. "I think this is because if I sit as a critic in certain situations, it's important for me also to show what I do in this sort of egalitarian environment of SCI-Arc. In other words, you wanna bitch, whaddya got?"
Here's what Eric Owen Moss has got.
Q: How do you think SCI-Arc is fitting into the fabric of Downtown?
A: SCI-Arc has an outreach program and one of the young faculty members [Alexis Rochas] went and built with, I don't know, 15 grand, a very unusual building for the homeless [a sun shelter for the LAMP Community]. I think what's interesting about that building and the reason it's important that Alexis did it is that very often, in architecture and planning, you have the sort of, in quotes, "design people," this sort of aesthetic side of architecture. And then you either have the practical or the pragmatic group. I think we would like to put those two categories together. But often they're not. So people who are interested in the social and political context of the city are not always people who have the capacity and the design sense to imagine it more poetically. I think that little example was important because it illustrated the fact that the social and political context that Downtown has to respond to can be responded to poetically. Not just in an ordinary way, in which case one could say, "Well, there are two houses where there were none."
Q: Is "Confrontation and Withdrawal" about Downtown development?
A: I think it's probably three subjects: One, it will have something to do with SCI-Arc and the role of SCI-Arc in the city, how it got here and what its prospects are. Two is my own office and the work we're doing in the city and around the world. And three, a specific discussion or two, depending on what the lawyers permit [laughs], about prospects for the area. So a mixture of those three. What's SCI-Arc, what's Moss, what's the area?
Q: You said part of it is a specific discussion of the area. Are you talking about the lot next door?
A: Could be.
Q: What's going on with that lot?
A: I don't know. What is going on? [chuckles]
Q: It raised a lot of buzz when there were reports that SCI-Arc might leave if you did not get the lot. Is that still possible?
A: I think SCI-Arc has absolutely no intention of going anywhere. And I think it would be disingenuous to suggest that. It's very important that SCI-Arc stay here. We're part of the neighborhood now. The LARABA [Los Angeles River Artists and Business Association] guys, Jonathan Jerald, Tim Keating, Charlie Woo, we're part of that group. We understand the area. And those are articulate, smart characters. That's why you don't see the jail down here. So I think we are part of the neighborhood conception of this area. We're a vocal part of that grouping. And so obviously we have an interest in how the area is developed. There are discussions of various kinds going on now and we'll see where they go. And I'm optimistic that we can resolve that in a way that actually, in the idealistic world of SCI-Arc, would give each and everyone what each and everyone desires.
Q: Is the aim for SCI-Arc to ultimately purchase that plot and develop it for student housing?
A: I don't know that that was ever the aim. I think when SCI-Arc came down here there was an enunciated urban planning conception called a "Unified Plan." Our sense was that the development of the area to the west of the freight depot building would be a process that the community, that LARABA, that the neighborhood, that the Arts District, the students, the faculty, the developer of the property would participate in. And we think that is a valid planning process. So that is our sense of our agreement with the city and our agreement with LARABA and the neighborhood. Hopefully we can all share in that. If we can, I think it's conceivable that something extraordinary can come out of that site.
Q: In a lecture you gave last year you examined how people often compare Los Angeles to other cities, and this isn't other cities. So what are your thoughts on this Downtown at this time?
A: I think that section of the lecture was called "Los Angeles on the Couch," referring to the psychiatrist's couch, in a humorous way, and there were really two sides to that personality on the couch. One is independence, self confidence, optimism and a sense that because the city is unique and uniquely young, and that was part of it - not only is Los Angeles young compared to a lot of cities, from which it differs radically, in conception. But it is being conceived now, so it is different radically in age, meaning age to youth. This is a city very much in a formative mode.
The other side of the psychiatrist's couch was the inferior side, the we don't know, we're not sure, we better ask somebody who did Columbus Circle.
So what I was obviously advocating was that Los Angeles ought to understand itself as a young, innovative and experimental city. And the presence of SCI-Arc Downtown might be a piece of that discussion. And that the city needs to imagine itself on its own terms as it defines those terms less with reference to, "Oh, here's the Champs Elysee, here's Las Ramblas, we better make Grand Avenue the Champs Elysee."
We better not. Different city, different meaning. Ain't no Arc de Triomphe, etc.
Q: Barcelona's Ramblas has been mentioned often as a possible model for Grand Avenue.
A: We're not on Mars. I'm not saying one can't fairly extrapolate in terms of certain qualities. But it is a very different city. I mean to say Midtown-Downtown; to define the city so decisively instead of to define it in a more flexible way. I mean, is Grand Avenue the Champs Elysee or is it Central Park, for instance? Or is it an amalgamation of the two, which would seem to be a contradiction in terms of typical cities, but it might very well be an amalgamation of very different kinds of things.
Q: SCI-Arc elected to come Downtown before the housing boom started. Now thousands of units are being built and the area is changing. What are your thoughts from an architecture and design perspective?
A: I think one of the lessons of the Culver City project [where Moss' firm worked] was that we didn't ever understand it as a master plan idea, in a fixed concept sense. Rather, we worked on a number of parts contemporaneous with each other. Sometimes the parts changed. Debbie Allen was going to do a dance studio, and then she wasn't. And then she was. Or Ogilvy was going to come in and have a theater. Or AOL would come in and do something.
What I'm saying is we could decide to paint the room all red. Or we could paint something over here orange, something over there green, something over there blue, and as we start to work together we might wind up with a rainbow that we never anticipated at all. And I think that sometimes [you have] to be patient enough to give some of the pieces room to evolve and develop - given the fact that at least from one point of view the city is very much a fluid city. So what you don't want to do I think is consign a very particular definition, but to give some room to see.
It's interesting how L.A. has absolutely the capacity to make nowhere somewhere. It has the energy, the imagination, and we ought to let L.A. run with that as a public policy.
Q: It's an interesting concept as you start to get high-rises down here: Nowhere is becoming somewhere.
A: Right. And I think that's important. In other words, it doesn't have to be somewhere to be somewhere, you know. We don't have the Loop. We don't have the Ringstrasse. We don't have the Ramblas. Those kinds of things can be made, but the Ringstrasse is not the Ramblas, and the Ramblas is not Fifth Avenue and Fifth Avenue is not the Loop and the Loop is not Market Street or whatever it is. So we have to have our turn in a way. We don't want the French turn. We don't want Barcelona's turn.
Q: What does the director of SCI-Arc do?
A: Not a goddam thing. That's why I'm never here.
Q: How many days a week are you here?
A:
Three. My office runs seven days, so I'm back and forth. It's a great job in many ways. One of the reasons is it's extremely flexible. I'm sitting in an office in the middle of the city, the finance committee comes in, the faculty comes in. So it's like wherever you are - I travel a little bit.
Even if you're here, it's actually very funny: The building is a quarter-mile long. So most of the people in that quarter mile from day to day are not always aware of your presence.
Q: Why did you want the job, and take the job, as director?
A: I didn't know what the hell I was doing [slight laugh].
I have over a period of years, I've taught here off and on. I've had chairs at Harvard and Yale. I've taught a little bit in Europe. So I have a connection with the academy. I think a number of architects in Los Angeles do. I think the academy was one way of finding a venue where people were talking about not what was, but what might be coming in the future. So it seems to me that's an important subject to participate in.
I'm not sure that what we all anticipated - that SCI-Arc would be a participant in this form, without specifying what this means, in a debate about the context in which we're sitting and how it would transform itself. But I have to say that it is typical of SCI-Arc that it lives its own lessons.
Q: What does that mean?
A: It means I'm not watching you out in the next block trying to discover what you should do with the railroad tracks or the right of way or the river or something. I'm doing it. And SCI-Arc's future in this area, and its opportunity to participate in the next 15, 20 years in the remaking of Downtown, has everything [to do] with confirming its presence and its viability on this site. So it is living out the political, developmental, neighborhood exchange, planning commission, Conservancy, neighborhood groups, city council, discussions of what it will take to ensure that. So it has to build its own form, it has to make its own places. Nobody will give it to SCI-Arc. I'm not saying people can't help.
In more general terms what SCI-Arc is involved in, in trying to make sure we have a place down here, is an illustration to students and the faculty of SCI-Arc's new role, which is as a much more extroverted participant in the political, in the public policy, in the zoning, in the city determination process. So we're not talking about simple buildings in a way, which are not necessarily always simple. But we're talking about more of an organization of the city and this piece of the city. The question is whether SCI-Arc can play at that table, as they say in Atlantic City or Vegas. Can we play that game or not?
Q: So can SCI-Arc play the game?
A: We're going to find out.
Eric Owen Moss' lecture begins at 7 p.m. in the Main Space at SCI-Arc. Free and open to the public. Entrance is next to the SCI-Arc lot at 350 Merrick Street between Traction Avenue and Fourth Street.
Contact Jon Regardie at [email protected]
12 Comments
That comment just about sums up his tenure as director. Guess it's not so much a tenure as an occupation.
A: I didn't know what the hell I was doing [slight laugh].
I think a lot of people don't share his sense of humor on this issue.
reconfirms to me even more -- why would anyone care what this asswhole has to say.
Hey Paul
Didn't you do moss' web site?
Yes I did, back in 1998 I believe.
So does tht mean the statute of limitations ran out on prefessionalism?
nataliedm - What are you referring to?
not speaking for paul, i dont read in anything in to that statement as an inferance of his opinion of moss.
read just how flipent moss is with his disregard of sci-arc is. is he that stupid to recognize why he wants to teach/practice and how one feeds the other? he is self destructive and clearly off his meds.
"Q: What does the director of SCI-Arc do?
A: Not a goddam thing. That's why I'm never here."
perhaps thats ok to trash talk something or someone at a bar over a few beers but clearly he has no regard for the institution and thinks he is above the commoners somewhere on mars.
he talks with such discregard to anyone else. clearly the faculty are above his childish moves or lack of leadership.
I think Moss just erradiacted any shred of proffesionalism he had with that interview....
you assume he HAD some to shred. nada -- in my opinion....he'd be known as 'toe rag' in chi town, but what do we know, were only midwesteners....
what the hell? the article is gone and so is our image?
The URL changed for that article on the LA Downtown News website.
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