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
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.”
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.
“Does anybody give a shit? Is anybody listening?" Moss pleads with him, asking us to consider the building's conceptual qualities. "It’s an opportunity to show there are other ways to imagine. What you see isn’t all there is to see. Can you listen for things you haven’t heard?”
We'll have to wait on the trio of towers Moss has planned nearby to find out.
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You too may have a future in architecture!
It is an unnecessary building, and it's really, really ugly.
I love it!
On the other hand, there is some fascinating and relentless steel and stucco construction in that building.
https://www.mattconstruction.c...
That is a lot of steel for a program as banal as an office building. Makes for interesting interior views, though...
I have a feeling we're moving from The Age of Fluff and Fancy to The Age of No Fooling Around.
Fuck Around -> Find Out?
As EOM points out in the article... it is a really old idea, 20+ years (which I think is about 5 years short of the zeitgeist this stuff really comes from)
I question whether it is still a viable building, but hey, they built it anyways. The sustainability argument is important, yes, but what of the mass of shit the contemporary art world creates every year? How sustainable is Damien Hirst?
I'm a bit disappointed that was the main criticism Wainwright pursued because the building is shockingly ugly, banal, and leaves much interesting technical, structural, and material development on the table.
“Does anybody give a shit? Is anybody listening?" Moss asks us to consider the building's conceptual qualities. "It’s an opportunity to show there are other ways to imagine. What you see isn’t all there is to see."
Yes it is...and that's the problem with modern architecture. Modernism has always relied on conceptualism to make up for its aesthetic limitations.
I don't completely disagree, but let's not take potshots at modern architecture, which can be aesthetically superior when done thoughtfully. This project is a departure from the essence of modern architecture and is just a weird amalgm of brutalism and the 1990s. The comparison someone made to shallow yet pretentious contemporary art is apt. I wouldn't mind it if it wasn't such a huge, expensive building as we all know it could have been better.
There are many beautiful modernist buildings, but it has always been a more conceptual style, thus the many isms to give it life. Even trad styles become lifeless if executed conceptually, but at least there’s some pattern. This thing is intentional chaos in an art that is inherently logical
Similar to this...
I remember with EOM came to give a lecture at UC in the late 90's. I made the mistake of sitting in the center of the large auditorium. 15 minutes into the lecture I realized what a arrogant wannabe provocateur he fancied himself to be, and now I was trapped with no easy escape option. In retrospect I should have made a spectacle of getting up and walking out (that would have been the EOM thing to do), but my midwestern upbringing would never permit it. So I sat there for another hour or so listening to his inane tales of form and what a iconoclast he was, until it mercifully ended. Since then he has produced a only few more turds for us to marvel at, this being the latest, and with any luck last. I learned a valuable lesson that evening, when Zaha came the following year I stood in the back and made a clean get away when it went off the rails in the first 10 minutes...
^ Excellent post, with a happy ending, as it were. (For those inconvenient, landlocked seating locations, don't forget the cyanide capsule in the teeth, ready to bite. It only works once, but this would be the occasion.)
I remember attending a panel at UCLA years back. Charles Jencks was literally reading a conference paper on some stylistic theory, racing through it to stay within his allotted time. He was so fast and frantic, and mentioned the dilemma. Frank Gehry hadn't had his turn yet, and casually offered, "Relax, Charles. You can have five minutes of my time." A good memory.
If SCI-arc students were willing to pay him $600k per year when he was the school director he must be a better architect than the reviewer gives him credit for being.......?
As the old saying goes - A fool and their money are easily separated
I don't think the students made that decision.
This 60-acre swath of former warehouses, known as the Hayden Tract, is an exhibition of architectural experimentation, a place where windows slant, columns convulse and globular protuberances burst out of walls.
“They understood how to utilise architecture as an incentive, as seduction,” says Moss, “as something to distinguish from this infinite sea of industrial brick and precast concrete.” The tactic worked and the ad agencies, tech companies and post-production studios flocked here, in a Richard Florida dream of the creative class in action. Over the years, Ogilvy, Sony, Kodak, Apple and Nike have all been lured here, taking space in buildings that Moss christens with quirky nicknames, like creatures in his psychotropic petting zoo.
From Wainwright's article. The earlier architecture in the area was almost literally nothing but bland, functional industrial boxes, and much of it still remains. There is no context to reinforce or explore. If the W)RAPPER draws high profile clients and fills up, influences other construction, and inspires others to relocate elsewhere in the area, we would have to say it is a success. I'm skeptical anything more refined and subdued could do the trick, in fact likely would be dead in the water once built.
And if the trend continues, with more architects creating buildings that startle and push the envelope, it could be either an exciting or disturbing place, depending on your point of view. I'm kind of curious and it could get wilder. This is the place to cut loose.
You have to wonder how long it will last, however, how long this wildness will be a draw, but who knows. If/when it no longer draws the clients, the place will turn into an unattended freak show until the bulldozers come.
I go back and forth myself. I don't see it as menacing at all, but rather fun and quirky. To me, the real risk is not that the W)RAPPER shocks, but that at some point we get used to it and say so what? Is there enough to justify it and sustain interest once the shock value wears off? And it will wear off quickly. I suspect there is a built-in obsolescence in the design, that its only virtue is its shock, that there isn't that much that engaging or interesting or convincing about it beyond that. Aside from the wrapping, it's a boring glass box.
Architecture has to sustain our shifting moods over the years, and I doubt the W)RAPPER can do this. There will be periods when we don't feel like fooling around, when it will just look silly. But again, who knows? Maybe all these buildings will be razed for something wilder.
The center cannot hold—Moss's mind is a leaf blower in a library. His Yeats reference is to the poem "The Second Coming," 1920, which begins:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming
The poem has often been cited the last years. It's an odd allusion for Moss, as Yeats describes a period of dissolution and chaos that, hopefully, precedes revelation and restoration of meaningful order. Moss seems to revel in the chaos for its own sake, with no meaningful reference to anything, without any resolution or future in sight.
These are marvelous times.
"I'm skeptical anything more refined and subdued could do the trick, in fact likely would be dead in the water once built." I do not think this is true. There are other offices built/planned in this area that are much more restrained in their design. The ONLY argument this building has going for it is "Why Not", which may be valid.
Sorry to be so late to the public flogging, but I've got to say I'm surprised at the appetite for carrion among my fellows. Used to be that experimentation was a given among those in our stable...accolades went to those who pushed the envelope; who had the guts to push concrete, steel and glass to the limits, to run at the front of the pack, but in today's woke climate it seems that obeisance, humility, and a servile persona are pre-requisites for acceptance as an architect. I don't know where we would be if Mies hadn't "dared" to build a glass house, or Wright hadn't upturned the structure at Fallingwater, but in today's climate of self-editing prigs its unlikely that the eyes, ears, and bodies of the purveyors of such shocking innovations would be pilloried and/or drawn and quartered for their infractions.
How about we commend EOM on his staying powers, his willingness to put himself and his imagination on the line, his willingness to inject novelty rather than abject conformity into the landscape. Architecture's job is, after all, just to keep the rain and vermin out, anything else of artistic or aesthetic note is quite simply superfluous, whether you're Chuck Basset at SOM, Zumthor, or Gehry, so please spare me the moans and groans about the Wrapper.
What is so distressing in the comments above is that they presume that there is some absolute, profoundly conservative dictum that governs the "morality" of design - "Oh, its too expensive", "Oh the design obstructs the view", "Oh, its dystopian!", my god, what about Rudolph Steiner! Why not "the views are remarkably varied", "your place by the window is unique" , "passers-by have a new landmark", etc. I'm personally offended that our hatcheries have become targets for ultra conservatives to batten the hatches and declare a moratorium on innovation...are there enough MAGA hats to go around?
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