Eric Owen Moss: Not farewell but fare forward (March 18, 2015)

thanks thanks for coming tonight this should be very interesting I'm I'm actually for a man who needs no introduction it's a little odd Erik gets two introductions tonight I'm actually only introducing the man who will introduce Erica and moss who you may know he spends time here in the school or non will be doing the the real introduction this is the fake introduction I think I think I'm only you're a second because if I mess this up you can make up for it I imagine the other thing is that I might be here try and humanize Erica and moss maybe I'm the non architect who gets to make Erica and moss into a human being instead of an architect but I don't think that's possible and and I don't think it's possible not just not because you're not a human being but because to separate you from architecture and and just turn you into a regular human being doesn't make any sense at all Eric I don't have to tell you I think you all know Eric Eric is consumed by architecture Eric is obsessed with architecture he he's someone who believes that everything architecture is and is related to is important and everything is related to architecture so it's my pleasure to introduce the man who will introduce Eric Cohen boss [Laughter] here at sci-arc we're we're the beneficiaries of Eric's obsession it seemed here on every wall in this building I'm the beneficiary of Eric's obsession I in so many ways in fact I don't think I'd be here in in any capacity if it were not for Eric oh and moss it's been said by press and other people that Eric has an overflowing repository of cultural references each part equal in deep insight and a DeeDee in conversation his tangents have tangents I see that but I think that that that's almost a parody of what Eric is that it's true but but ultimately he's I think a lot more simple than that what he himself says is stuff like you don't know we don't know we might know we should try to know he gets comfort in a context of intrinsic uncomfortableness that's what makes him different I I saw him ask a question and then question the nature of the question it ended up becoming something that changed the way I look at everything in in architecture and even in real estate he has said your job students and I guess faculty as well it's not necessarily to solve a problem but to make a problem one that may not be solvable I as a developer find that a little annoying and and actually difficult to deal with but that's the nature of Eric I think he his resume is a long and distinguished one he has an incredible body of work and an incredible amount of time that he has spent teaching others about that work but that's not really how I know him I can only tell you about him from what I saw what I saw in the last 15 years while I've known Eric I saw him take on the tumultuous unsteady and unsure sci-arc in 2002 he led and guided it as no one believed possible in the end he delivered CyArk and delivered us IARC that remained pedagogically intact financially more secure and sustainable than ever in its history he led the school not by promoting any particular doctrine but rather through the force of his irreverence and his ethics faculties and students were given freedom but then immense responsibility to act and develop their own points of view I personally saw him drive the purchase of this building I saw him do it when no one else thought we could get around to finally buying this thing he changed it he was like a dog with a bone when he tried to get this building from the original developers and for that alone he deserves our thanks and applause [Applause] I saw him reach into the world of developers and bankers and politicians no small task and he learned to speak their language without losing his own voice which was incredible I saw him compromise I saw Eric Moss compromise I saw him do it when we were working on the building north of here and he had to deal with the Los Angeles Conservancy a great organization but not exactly Eric's cup of tea and the Los Angeles Conservancy and Eric started out here and here and then over the course of months and months and months found something that not only would they agree with but would support in front of City Council and that was a great testament to what he could do I saw him surround himself with voices every bit as strong as his and engaged them as the happy warrior alternating between his Don Quixote and his son Cho Panza tilting at windmills and Giants alike I saw him carve his list of fellow mischief makers into the walls of CyArk lebbeus woods Raymond Abraham Peter no ever and of course Wolfe and Tom I saw his dedication to them and their voices making sure CyArk would never forget them his uncomfortable friends I saw his astounding lecture the man from the country where no one else lives last year did it who saw that lecture did you see this lecture nobody saw this lecture last year Jesus get on get on sigh ox website go to lectures go to Eric's lecture because it's astounding and I saw in in that the full spectrum of the architect the genius and the poet that is Eric Moss Moss embraced the challenge not to confuse technical means with poetic ends and brought us all along for the ride I saw him change while he was here yes Eric I did I saw you change he changed from instigator to teacher to leader and ultimately to conscience and now remains the instigator he's come full circle back where he belongs near the end of TS Eliot's Four Quartets the book Moss was reportedly reading the day his client Frederick Smith first stopped in his office is a phrase that sounds just like Eric we shall not cease from exploration and at the end of all our exploring we'll be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time now as I see him contemplating his next phase I see him getting more and more comfortable with being uncomfortable thanks for that Eric Cheers and now it's my pleasure to introduce the man who will introduce the man of whom we speak another director with three names are non Diaz Alonso [Applause] [Music] [Applause] thank you Tom for that for everything else and you and the rest of the board that's for the school you will see that even though Tornai we didn't cordially there's gonna be some common grounds on this introduction I just realized that we shouldn't have six or seven introductions so we will reduce Eric's talk to five minutes and that will be something to see but I'm spitballing here so stay with me first before I get to the formal introduction of the guide who the names of the world I wanna have like a twenty seconds touchy touchy touchy feely feeling thing which is very unusual for me I mean clearly thankful for Eric for all these years of friendship and mentorship and many other personal things I'm not going to go into it and I want to say that at least once publicly and come from a family and a tradition that we don't talk about the things so that will be the only time I will say that in the months to come but I wanted to say once at least now Eric almost as you can imagine for somebody who does the most convoluted of skills and difficult introductions are anybody in this world will ever heard he's a difficult task to do so for a man of simple tastes like myself I thought it would be easy to start to tackle certain basic ideas so one simple thing was his last name has a lot of interesting in brief when you put in this segment see and if you go and do the basic thing which is to check what they mean a body of coherent matter usually on indefinite shape and offer of considerable size we don't know we will be talking about his buildings himself his ego his attitude but one thing Tom mentioned I have the pleasure to never seen Eric compromise and to me that's a great thing mess I think that world would fit really really well in many many aspects I don't know how to say the second world so a dirty and tidy or or disorder condition again it's not clear what we're talking about here miss to fill to hitter a strike to miss a target to failure to take advantage of to miss a chance I mean I don't think that he means that much but when he does I think he doesn't on purpose and that also is an interesting thing to think about mas what it means bear would use with object to cover with the growth of most to most a criminal wall it's basically when a lot of crap awesome top something but also a thing you can say a recall for the Latin Muslim who means I really don't know it's not I don't know it means that in Latin and moves which i think is a very interesting one a state of disorder of untidiness verb useful object to put in this order make it messy Rumpel often follow it by up now the other thing which I want to touch which is a very complicated and convoluted aside way to what I really want to say is that if you take 1s out and you say moose moose is in a Spanish car game which was my fault my father favorite game it's a Spanish game and players in Spanish America it's basically a game that you go for either to win or to lose and you have to announce it before you do it but the other interesting thing the most car game was invented in the same century the Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra wrote don quixote de la mancha which already Tom touch of this and the reason we're touching of this because we hear him so many times to invoke Don Quixote de la Mancha and I thought as somebody who is Argentinian the son of a Spanish person that I thought it will be good to not to set the record straight but to clarify certain things about Don Quixote de la Mancha which if you don't read Spanish you can I'm not so sure you will fully understand but the other thing which is interesting is is a cultural endeavor is not just a book is not just a character is not just a writer he symbolized centuries of centuries of a culture and embodies many many rid of it so there are many Don Quixote Don Quixote dominant Miguel Cervantes Saavedra wrote but also the me they are the Don Quixote paintings from Picasso to the ones in the middle on the right to the different actors that they play donkey hotels along the years so there are many donkey hotels there are many ways to think about this and if you look up some of the text is there is a clear reason why Eric I think likes to quote and often refer to Don Quixote and the one I choose you can read unknown I read all the way but basically is the most obvious and no one good Sancho Panza as well giant the one that you can see over there and Sancho says of course they're not giant everybody knows the story and at the end this is the cool part obviously this will prolong quixote you don't know that much about adventures now there are many donkey caught this there Marek many Eriko and moss and anyway actually the Don Quixote that I think he comes close to Don Quixote is the one and terry gilliam tried to do in 2000 who could never finish in anybody know the story of the movie the movie everything that could go wrong went wrong the main actor watch for dye in the middle all the problems that you can think here is but terry gilliam keep insisting and doing it and doing it and doing it and at the end I became a documentary called lost in La Mancha and because the movie didn't happen but it documented happy about the movie it became the perfect representation what Don Quixote is the separation between the fiction of the contraction of the fiction and the reality of the complexity that such and they were produced in a strange way loss in La Mancha becomes the most precise definition of Don Quixote and in a way one could argue that is a perfect metaphor but for the act of architecture which is you know that everything that can go wrong will go wrong but they will not deviate from your passion and eventually you can make a different story about other adventures so I took a quote of the many things that you can find over Eric on the website but I think this one is a powerful one when you say I don't think you move the discussion of architecture you're so happy and everything in the world is working because then if everything is functioning then you tend to continue to do what you will do anyway I think you have to be disappointed frustrated of angry you have to see the world could be something other than it is different narratives and that you also have to think you can make it go somewhere else well is for better for worse it's a more philosophical discussion and I think that was make what makes people change things regarding if he's writing something like you do or composing an opera or write in a book or something it has to be different now in all these years I've been in this game in one way or another I never met anybody more committed to that idea and I think he's our treasure and joy that we have him here so one last thing I would like to say Eric one Moss is never lost for words but it's always in La Mancha which is this weird state between reality fiction what it is and what it could be so I will not tell you to join me to welcome to Aegon sire because eric is inside and Eric many ways is hired so Eric your turn [Applause] [Music] thank you very much mr Gilmore very kind and generous and is slightly sentimental which is not your way to say nothing of or not qualities unseen and unrecognized so thank you very much I appreciate all of that I'm the enemy in case you didn't know or in case you missed it in the introduction I think as was pointed out I've said that and I've said it on a number of occasions and the meaning of I'm the enemy I think is important to mention at least briefly the culture has its rules the culture has its pro-forma the culture has its methods and its systems and when you arrive and most of the people that are sitting here are students or young students you arrive to a context which exists a priority you arrive to a context which is defined and organized and systematized and I think the job is to resist that to counter it to contest it that's the job of the architect and that's the enemy the culture the defined culture is the enemy but the second enemy is a little bit more insidious and the more I stand here and tell you who the enemy is and pontificate and explain the more you have to wonder whether I'm not the character that I'm advising you to watch out for because the more I claim to know and the more I feel that I understand and the more I've worked over a period of time to the point where I think at one point I didn't know or wasn't clear or didn't understand but now I've done it I've redone it I'm comfortable with it and that leads I think to a conceptual complacency so I think what what I have to do is both follow the conviction that I have and simultaneously be suspicious of it mistrusted otherwise I become the target that I'm admonishing you to watch out for this is a quote that that says a similar or delivers a similar message in slightly different words rice pudding stuck in the microwave and comes out macaroni and I think what it has to do with is what we know or what we think we know and knowing means the capacity to predict to understand and to predict so we know how the world works and we know where it will go there's another possibility which is that as you learn and as you go forward you actually unlearn so that in the end it's at least hypothetical hypothetically possible that the conclusions the conclusions you arrive at are different than the conclusions you started with and the sum total of knowledge doesn't grow but it simply changes and so whether this is literally true or not or an aspiration or a metaphor the prospect that what could come out is not what you anticipated coming out but a very different possibility a friend gave me this recently this is the cover of Charlie Hebdo the first cover that arrived following the killings in Paris several months ago and I associate not the heroism of the writers and artists who work there but with an aspiration in architecture it has something to do with conviction it has something to do with tenacity it has something to do with resilient with resilience all of those essential in the face of resistance in the face of opposition in the face of those in a tyrannical way in a cultural way in a political way who will attempt to cover the earth with concrete because they always do and they always will but for those of you who work with concrete the concrete always cracks and out of the cracks come the resistance that's you guys in the front row that's me out of the cracks they cover the world concrete it cracks we come out of the cracks this has to do with with a different problem that I think in one form or another we all have a philosophical problem and more deeply an existential problem is starting on the left that Durer which is early in the sixteenth century which is a woodcut of the apocalypse I've shown it here before so you know it and you know the story of war famine pestilence and death comes from revelation but what's interesting to me in this context is that it's a story and it's a shirred story so if you put that woodcut which is extraordinary up on a wall in northern Germany at the beginning of the sixteenth century whether people read it or not of read revelation or could read it they know the story they relate to the story they connect with the story it's a shared meaning now dial it up 400 years and you got one Gris in this case Gris Braque and Picasso and now we run into a somewhat different problem which is sustained I think to this day which is a privatization of content and that means it's no longer a sheared story it means it's a more private and personal and idiosyncratic story and what that brings with it are critics and and evaluators and tastemakers and interpreters and all of that because the work is not generally shared the meanings aren't collectively understood so we'll turn to science because surely science and technology that you all know and love will give us an underpinning and a foundation and a premise and from that we can go forward knowing we can count on that so this is Phobos the twin of demos known as the steeds of Mars there are ideas about the forms of heavenly bodies they have a certain shape they go in a certain direction these are the wrong shape and they go in the wrong direction so maybe science isn't the shared story either this is one we discussed last week Lucien Freud work on the left with a comment that all art are all essential art is autobiographical and the burden of that which is illustrated in the image and the question is is architecture or can architecture can the architecture that comes from me be understood as personal and autobiographical and I think it is and I think it can be and this is for instance for it's a project about 20 years old some of you know it the original model was made out of a lemon rind that was lying on a desk so it had a curvilinear quality the transformation of that in the built object was a series of a thousand concrete blocks everyone the same everyone different but the transition from something which is curvilinear and smooth to something which which was incremental and essentially orthogonal is important and I think the characteristics of this if I were looking at Lucien Freud looking back in a mirror it's rough it's uneven it has uncertainty mixed with conviction it's crude in some ways and I think the objective is that by the end of the process we'll understand how to do it at which point we probably will take a look at another option this as an underpinning for the work has also to do with with the evolution of content in literature in music and in architecture and the most unusual work the most personal work the most investigatory work the most imaginative work consistency consistently has to do with these interrogatories what is literature what is music what is architecture and on the left is is a map some of you may know it of Finnegan's Wake which is not only a literal map and mapping itself related to modeling and predicting and understanding but but this is this is a map in the context of literature which is not only geography but psychology within Finnegan's Wake the second one from the left John Cage Rage who raises a completely different area of interest essentially what is music and is me or what is sound and is music only auditory if you've listened to cage you might debate whether its auditory at all but what it also is is visual its aesthetic so that music is not only what you hear it's what you see so this is a new vantage point on what music might be and then then all of you many of you recognizes you separate Aranya in the dan tam which is essentially Dante's Divine Comedy and journey from from Hell to paradise via purgatory and the intersection of a journey a literary journey transformed as architecture so the lack of definition or the unwillingness to accept the limit or an 'a priori limit as criteria for what makes an art form is essential to making it again the two quotes one on the left one on the right and this comes by the way from a film called the wind which was made in 1928 by a Swedish director called Victor see strim and the the comment that it's relatively easy and we have a lot of success adjusting to circumstances so what does that mean I mean if it rains and I put up an umbrella and a coat and a hat I'm adjusting to circumstances let's say if it's windy and I put on the same coat and hat I'm adjusting to circumstance if we redefine the meaning of the wind if we say a what the wind is a horse in the sky and by the way this as filmmaking goes 19:28 which is a pretty sophisticated piece so now we've made the subject into something we've metamorphosize the subject the metaphor is different and we've said the winds not the wind and we'll accommodate it with a coat and a hat we're saying the wind is a horse in the sky to do that in other words to make the circumstance to invent the circumstance instead of accommodating the circumstance would be the aspiration this gets heavy or heavier the the drawing Blake's drawing you know it has an antecedent in proverbs and and the question that he asks is who is God or what is God and the ordering mechanism that somewhere in the discourse of architecture whether fractals or Euclid has something to do with geometry and the compass which connotes that and other investigations that don't so much say this is geometry but say what is geometry Rothko or unboxing Rothko on the left unboxing the Box on the right my dad was a writer and I can remember when he wasn't writing he was making lists and he used to make lists of words and the interrelationship of words there sounds that a rhyme there meanings and every time I do a lecture and there have been lots of these and probably the last four or five years I've shown this list which has no beginning which has no end but which is added to and subtracted from as my father did so this is my list [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] her nun looked at this and said ma she can't make anything pretty but he was wrong there's there's a second sequence of buildings that I want to run in just a second and for those of you who have worked on many projects and tend to think of buildings quoi buildings or building begins and ends and then another building comes and begins and ends and another building comes and begins and ends and for a long time I've thought about that process as an aggregate process which means the buildings are not only buildings per se but pieces of buildings and that if we added the pieces in the aggregate that we would get conceivably a single work and that work also is ongoing so you don't get to the end of it [Music] very quickly I think I'm Way behind you know I want to talk about two projects that have to do with a collision with time collision with time in a very particular way certainly the topic of architecture and the durability of architecture in the intersection of Time present I think Gilmore mentioned that Elliott piece time past time present and time future and when you work on a project which has two pieces have to remain like working on a piece of paper where you can erase certain things but you can't erase everything and the intersection I think of what is contemporary and what is the future is liable to be violent you have to move the present out of the way in order to in order to insert the future this is a little bit different conceptually from working on something which is entirely new because it obligates you to make certain choices what to stay what of the past stays one of the presence days and how to move the the present out of the way and accommodate the future this is a project a couple of years ago at the UN given day in Vienna this is the Danube canal and three existing buildings 19th century into in the 20th century a courtyard in the middle and the Museum of on Devon they could sitting there in the middle the metaphor for this which has been talked about a bit I think were the birds the birds on the wire which is simply a sense of kinetic and my interpretation had to do with the 19th century in the 20th century certainly is static and what was inserted as in motion the the kinetic insertion would be these birds on a wire and you can follow on the right the chronology the structure the birds the second project is is a current one and is a remarkable and a wonderful opportunity for an architect in in a city which is in some ways a quintessential city for architecture Barcelona and this is the term eCos which has a long history I give it to you in a concise way it's a power plant that was designed and built in 1970 fossil fuels and ran through 2010 and was terminated finished and in the process of remaking the the seaside the Mediterranean Sea Barcelona adjacent this project it was determined would become something else which raises a whole series of questions again in terms of what stay what stays and what's removed and why but it is already at this point iconic it's the biggest building in Barcelona so it'll be amended it'll be added to but in a fundamental way it won't come down the other fascinating issue and this for me has to do with the whether it's a bromide or not I'm not too sure but the old discourse about the interrelationship of form and space and program so we should understand as the Louvre was once somebody's home so this which will become residential in office and entertainment and convention and all sorts of observation all sorts of uses is being fit into a form or into a shape or into a space for which there was no original intention and I think we could argue more and more persuasively that the form of the building has nothing to do or very little to do with what it accommodates by the way so this is tarah Mika's in barcelona [Music] this would be the requisite environmental component using the tides [Music] holding them at high tide holding them at low tide and then using gravity flow through turbines to produce hydroelectric energy which doesn't make anybody particularly virtuous [Music] in a slightly more recent rendition of that so I want to give you a new theory of urbanism not so much what it is but why it is so the sky and the earth and the sea no limits no boundaries and the city the advent of the city on the Left what I call the city of instinct in the middle what I call the city of method or system and on the right what I call the city of redundancies and I think the point the psychotherapeutic point is not that cities are made for trade or cities are made for defense or all the arguments those come after I think cities are made by us to give our lives a story and we develop our lives in the context of the city that's where it happens but it has no intrinsic meaning it's the way we've provided limits where there are no limits or minutes where there are no hours so the meaning of the city as as as I explain it in this context has to do there's a psychoanalyst called Alfred Adler who was a contemporary of Freud and of Jung and he talked about something you may have heard of called the inferiority complex and in that context I think we who were minuscule in the face of vast and limitless space make the city to give our lives a conceptual story infrastructure substantive piece of making cities I just took this for LA since some of you know it so the river as infrastructure the power grid is infrastructure that the Train right-of-way and of course the freeways and and these pieces have historically put been put down constructed for mechanical or tactical reasons to move the water to move the power to move the train to move the automobiles without much sensibility for the context of the city that that they're subdividing so that infrastructure is historically and consistently the fun divisive divisive another point leading up to a city project this is Jim sterling in this dots gallery and in Stuttgart and what has always interested me about this piece is the intersection of a public life in a private life so the red line takes you from from the the street above where you live through a sort of circuitous route through the museum and out to the bus stop down at the bottom of the slide and the point would be that there are any number of incredible fantastic intriguing adventures in the private world whether on a university campus or whether on the streets of a city and the notion of integrating that public movement system with private ongoings it seems to me is an advocacy worth supporting this is a project that that were that were at work on for the last couple of years in Nanjing it's a wetlands south of the existing city and there is an important history of nanjing like with many Chinese cities and in particular at least in contemporary historical terms there's a little book a kind of airport waiting room book called the rape of Nanjing where Nanjing was was torn apart during and before the Second World War by the Japanese so there is a sensibility there which certainly advocates or aspires to a new Nanjing and a remade Nanjing and the client for this particular project belonged to the Military Institute which is a little like Sandhurst in England or West Point in the United States and has that particular history well in his mind so the idea is to remake the city by adding a new series of pieces four pieces on this wetland site the way that so this is this is site number one the area is about 25 26 kilometers the gross area on a side so essentially a square 25 26 kilometers and the way it was done was not the way one runs into certainly in the United States Planning and Zoning studies with colors and maps and done two dimensionally in fact in some ways the buildings were done before there was a site and before there was a topography so the buildings are conceptually typological I would say their spatial and formal and they're also topological their organizational and the strategy is to make types which are Type O and topo and then accommodate those to the topography of the site so in a sense it's like having an alphabet and not yet the words and we make the alphabet first and then we apply it on at the rear of there there are two key portions to the site one the wetlands into this mountainous area and you're gonna flip through these pretty quickly but it so this is site number one dimension of about six seven kilometers this way all of the sites are connected by canals using existing waterways where we can or trams there's a tram which connects the sides or a road system which is which is happenstance of what exists and what we have to add to accommodate it over here the there was a lake we've added to it to enlarge it so it accommodates the floodplain and then made Islands so these are man-made can I say man-made human-made islands here for this portion of the site and then the mountain developed and the rest of the site left as it is and I just did though just to go through this so this is these are type ologies that we developed this the original island this is called a sun court building of large scale oriented and developed around the Sun this is a stacked island which accommodates fingers that connect other islands and and perspective towers this piece over here is is is on the mountain or the hillside which steps to accommodate the topography and so on so the lakeside the mountainside this is the second site second site was done and now I refer back to the to the infrastructure discussion that infrastructure here becomes cohesive not divisive and the building is the infrastructure and the infrastructure is the building so that in East West Road which divides here this is essentially the building and a north-south road meet as a structure of bridges which include then all of the accoutrements are all of the aspect of life of living of working of entertainment public and private events associated with the water on that bridge and the rest of the site essentially left and the left as it is naturally so the towers and these are towers which twist to the Sun face the wind the support system nothing is only what it is so the rule if there's a rule is that every piece has a number of meanings multiple meanings not single meanings particularly in terms of the infrastructure these this is a photovoltaic structure wrapped around the bridge which is the entry bridge to the site so it accommodates automobiles it has a structure and it holds photovoltaics and so on the third site takes on the topic of the superblock which we all know and have heard of and discourse a number of years going back to the Athens charter and and team 10 and the superblock means simply that the gridded City the small gridded city is an anachronism and the grid is eliminated and and a substantially larger structure accommodates the small pieces that heretofore belong to the to the grid and this is an existing roadway it actually runs north and south which is developed as a high density area with green over in and around the road and then as we move east and west the structure varies and dissipates and ultimately becomes what essentially is a rural structure and then again the archetypes this is both an office and a residential structure this is a dam which accommodates residential and also erode this is and this is an organization for housing in wetlands and so on and so on and this is the final one which which was called the mountain or the Citadel City a hill or a mountain with essentially a plateau on top with a perimeter now developed of city wall with gates with a campus on the top and a series of cisterns so this is really a sequence of water flow water is collected at the top of the hill pumped to the city gates dropped through the city gates by gravity through turbines producing hydroelectric power to tributaries and then to reservoirs which exists so the chronology is largely chronology of water and again the the prototypes the city wall and the city gate and the waterfall and so on this is a project many of you know in in the area central area of Los Angeles and Culver City and I think what what I prized most over the years about working on this is that that and in some ways it could be called this nothing or something or nothing to something but it began as a project where there was very little of value which is which is not to disparage the local residents or whatever they were doing there but simply the the value of the area or the meaning of the area as architecture as an experimental zone or in the end as the aggregate of a number of pieces of architecture over time was not part of the process it was nothing and nowhere and it became I think something somewhat different and in terms of the archetype discussion so this was this was the original version that led to what we're doing in Nanjing with the horticultural and the curtain and the stilts and of course the anomalies and so on this is the site the whoa this area in Culver City subdivided by euphemistically the LA River and then a second zone which we call the Los Angeles project the first phase of that project is shown here to identify it next to what is now the the Expo Line here and the river Jefferson Boulevard and across the top La Cienega and this was the first building that was built there I think historically of some consequence in an area that had known riots in the 1960s and then in the 1990s this was the first new building that was built certainly in a long period of time that was done for sin and sin Aeon Kodak in their headquarters and subsequently and we're now at work on this which is a which is a new chronology the existing roughly a hundred meters long the original Kodak building and then the beginnings of a roof garden and then the intervention in this new building existing building owned by the same owner and then the insertion of a series of roughly 10,000 square-foot components for small companies or startup companies and then the connections between those pieces and then what we call the narcissus project which is organizationally a second phase of the original Kodak project and then the the towers you see here and in in the aggregate the solution that were at work on at the moment this is the second site where we've been at work on a tower project which originated this these studies this is this is an exhibition at the Wexner called the dancing bleachers and I think that discussion had to do with an exchange with the architect whose name I can't remember but at the Wexner where the grid is the priority the grid the bent grid the folded grid but always the grid and we introduced this is Eisenman's project and we introduced the dancing bleachers and the curved line so in the abstract it really has to do with curved versus the straight line and the curve has portents whether it delivers it or not portents of a sinner so the possibility of a sinner the sinner doesn't hold and so on nevertheless the prospect of a sinner with a curved line which doesn't exist with a grid so this was the dancing bleachers and then this this exhibition we did here and then the hanging of that piece in the Macan Vienna this was the original scheme produced 1999-2000 and then the introduction of what I would call the form language of the circle as it as it meets the block the tower which is we're currently working on which is a fascinating story for us this is a building that can't be permitted according to the building code in the city of Los Angeles so essentially we have to invent our own code which runs through a process called peer review so we have to make a case who the engineers and the architects and so on and hired consultants that are building essentially with no columns and no beams conforms to an opera are a series of code requirements which will allow us to build a building and I think we're about to or about to get there just in terms of there there are three different floor heights that we're building a 24 foot floor 16 six floor and a 13 sixth floor there have been a whole series of investigations it's steel and concrete it's only steel the perimeter is the core the interior is the core essentially the way it operates is that these pieces which we call the ribbons and circumnavigate the form and land it points on the elevation are now connected across the the in the short direction connected by girders which in turn support these girders and these beams and that's the way the building will stand yeah so it's come to this has it so this is this is the finite element analysis by the structural engineers and it turns out now that the building for the whole series of reasons having to do both with efficiencies and costs and lateral loading issues will be on Isolators some of you know that discussion essentially the Isolators are separating the ground from or the ground and the below ground from the building and the building above ground so it looks like the pro forma includes Isolators now and we're going forward to that and looks like it's all gonna work we hope this is part of it actually I mean there's a lot of there's a lot of discussion about tension and if you talk to your psychologist they'll probably tell you to find a way to eliminate the aforementioned tension and and it seems like if we don't look for it by intention we find it and then to dwell in it and to work in it is is both difficult and exhilarating and we're trying to figure out how to do this and how to implement it so it's a conceptual model and then it's a technical model and then it's a political model and it has to operate in all of those venues and the tension between can we do it will we do it I mean you're looking at something that's 15 years old we'll do it this is this is the iconography and I put up another Brancusi and the shukoff tower which is fantastic in in Moscow and something that that I've admired for years but I was just reading this afternoon and I wanted to mention to this because I think God did us all a disservice whether that's sacrilege or not because I read the story of the Tower of Babel because I wanted to trace the aspiration to scrape the sky as far back as I could and the Tower of Babel was apparently when everybody spoke the same language and was constructed and was built and was built successfully did you know that so it was it was built successfully and God got a little bit irritated according to this story because if people were able to do this and to do it successfully god knows what they would do they could do anything so God got a little concerned and D foliated the project and so on and we've been aspiring to join or to rejoin the Tower of Babel ever since that's the end of the story this is the there's a site number three in here which is which is to the south and west that we're now working on which belongs to the same owner so this is again the river and Jefferson Boulevard and this is the site and over here is the Kodak project then you can follow the chronology on the left essentially what it is is the interworking of three structures a base building which has very large floors retail and office space a garage structure underneath and the second office tower in the area on the side in a theater with about 450 seats course structure so this is a new project we're getting ready to present this to an entitlement submittal in the next few weeks so this is erich mendelsohn and the trenches of Verdun in 1917 and I've probably already covered this at some level but I wanted to I wanted to say something about the interrelationship between a sketch or a concept and the implementation of the sketch and if you know something of the history of the I insist on Stein tower and Potsdam it was built by piling up bricks and then plastering the building so this in my rendition wouldn't be so much an understanding of how to build it as it would be the building of an image which is not what we want to do and these are these are examples I think of that exploratory discussion that belongs both to a conceptual sketch and an idea as a Mendelssohn's project and the technical implementation of that idea which doesn't always succeed immediately but that's part of the interrogatory that belongs to investigatory architectures so this has to do with bending glass and this has to do with using water pipes as concrete forms and this has to do with spring fiberglass on the exterior of buildings I like this project especially because nobody knows what the hell it is in a way of building what is it how did you do that with with no program it's come to be known as the art tower and you can you can see the the the excavation the original excavation and the development of it essentially as a piece of iconography that represents an area although it's fair to say it probably wouldn't have been done without the advent of the Expo Line this is another project you'll think it's two buildings but two buildings actually that are one notwithstanding the fact that they're not connected starts with the original existing tower which is a steel frame that held an old industrial press this is an early scheme but I show it only because this is the residual consequence of that industrial press this goes back to about 1993 and then this is the the contemporary version which which will turn out to be of all things a very high-end restaurant but what I what I mean and what I'm saying is this is one project the height is the same the plan dimension is the same so the discourse of the dialogue is between these two typology like the little lemon rind project that I showed initially the the conceptual model is a curve but the translation of the curve is in two pieces that are asymptotic to the curve essentially orthogonal so that where the curve is is tighter or steeper the horizontal dimension of the grid increases in one and enlarges the grid the grid widens these are the legs which essentially were done to conform to the configuration of the exterior not the other way around so the shape was developed and the shape was confirmed and then the the the columns and the corners are analogous although not identical to those shapes this is also of interest by the way that the that the beam flanges intersected the column and the way that was designed there are actually plates very carefully drawn and chapter on and reviewed and so on it's on there are plates internal to the columns that sustain the forces and the flanges as the flanges meet the columns except for the fact that when we when we x-rayed the columns this the plates were here instead of here and the I guess the can you dance discussion has now to do with how do you accommodate what was a mistake and the way we did that was adding these plates as you see so this is let's say where it is this is where it should have been and plates were added after long discussions and consideration of other options which seems to me again to be part of that process of thinking and rethinking in order to make it operationally intelligible because in the end science as we said with Phobos is not always science either this is this is a project that were at work on now which is both parking and retail or retail and office and it originated in this discussion which you've seen before the Sirah process and the points a conservative and extremely conservative painting in a sociological way lined up and behaving on the banks of the sin but with a very radical technique the surface of points which led to this which led to this which was the Smithsonian competition that must go back about eight or nine years which we thought we had won but wasn't in given to a British Lord and and so this is this is the current version which is somewhat smaller what distinguishes this I think and and part of it is wonder I think for me that may be an element that I left out in the original discussion about knowing or not knowing or I'm the enemy or mi the enemy that the quality of wonder sometimes disappears over time and glass and what glasses as a transparency and an ethereal quality that almost isn't there and the magic of this is that the the glass tubes as Anna Smith Sounion as in this project are structural elements among other things so that there are vertical chords in a truss in compression which holds up the roof so the wonder of that and the magic of that and I guess the capacity to continue to be astonished I'm surprised it will stand and apparently it will so this is this is the is the interior of that space the intersection of the structure coming from the garage up and then what is what is the the structure of the retail and office space and then this is the I think this is the last project this is the Culver City area and a project that we've been at work on for about 15 years this is the original site area with a number of extant buildings and then the next step is these piece which are retained so retained retain retain these go away and then the the elements which are added over here and then looking west and looking east this is again a project that we worked on for about 12 years we built the garage which holds about 650 650 cars and ran the structure up and the structure sat there rusting for about 12 years but finally and this is the building on the street and then the entrance to the site and then movement through the site and there the columns rusting for lo these many years and the original studies for the pterodactyl project and the original model study for the project it's an office building of about 20,000 square feet on two floors which hangs over the entrance to the garage as you see here the first floor being open and the second floor originally designed to privatize spaces which didn't lend themselves to open office space a conference space and the media space and cafeteria space and it's on in time and we built it finally after 12 years I'm happy to say it's the East elevation the West elevation the building is subdivided in the north-south direction by a bridge which organizes the space actually in a very conventional not to say conservative way and the smaller spaces which are to the west are used for offices of private work and the larger spaces to the east more open collective space midnight at the Oasis in case you can't find a reference that will provide your foundation intellectual and existential my recommendation is to invent your own make your own we're doing another one now I'll believe it when I see it which means prove it to me and then I'll go along with you or this book in this case I'll see it when I believe it means I believe it and I'll make it so this we're doing with it solely an ad see you and in China and finally a hundred years apart and contemporaneous thank you very much you

Channel: SCI-Arc Media Archive

Views: 175

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: SCI-Arc, Southern California Institute of Architecture, Power plants, Repurposing, New towns, Nanjing, Culver City, Museums, Wonder

Id: SU7Fq124rAc

Length: 81min 8sec (4868 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 10 2017