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 Backslash. Film studios, television stations and start-up technology firms have leased office space in Moss' variety of boundary-pushing, if occasionally spatially inefficient, structures.

Pterodactyl, one of the most recently completed additions to the Tract, is a parking garage that also features office space, but without burying the parking underground or simply constructing a boring stack of floors on top. Here is a building that is visually arresting but also conceptually engaging: why should parking be disguised or buried? What is the purpose of office space in an increasingly mobile world? An architect who has cited musician John Cage as an influence in his work, Moss explores terrain that is never familiar but always memorable. As he once stated in an interview, “Architecture is an anachronism in the sense that it can’t gratify instantaneously. It teaches a different lesson.”  

For more on EOM:

• A critical look at Downtown L.A.'s ambitious plans for two new public parks​ 
• Eighteen recipients win in the 2016 AIA Honor Awards
• Improvisation and Troublemaking: Frank Gehry in Conversation with Eric Owen Moss at SCI-Arc