Samurai Architect Attacks ‘Shapelessness’ of the City

Eric Owen Moss, a weathered warrior of Los Angeles’ architectural avant-garde, describes his latest project as “an exercise in samurai conservation.”

Summarizing his radical transformation of the 1940s Paramount Laundry Building in Culver City into an office complex that includes his own studio, Moss uses fierce metaphors to conjure up images of hand-to-hand combat:

“We sliced the solid reinforced concrete body of the old structure and opened up its guts. We chopped a section out of the bottom string of the wooden bow trusses to insert a third floor bridge. We cut holes in the roof for a series of vaults. We carved a circular stair lobby out of the laundry’s chunky interior shape. And then we put on a new street-front mask to signal the building’s reincarnation as warrior architecture.”

The Power of Form

Internationally recognized as a leader in his field, Moss, 45, is energized by the “emotive power of form. I want to challenge the perception of what’s proper, of the received wisdom that often makes architecture so boring,” he says. “My urge is to transform the mundane through the force of the imagination, through sheer acts of will that seize the opportunities of time and place.”

Los Angeles, Moss maintains, “is the perfect place for an architectural samurai. Because (the city) is so amorphous, it demands a supreme act of will to seize that shapelessness and stamp it with your signature. You wouldn’t have the same freedom of self-invention in New York, Boston or Chicago. In Los Angeles, the force of the creative individual will is everything.”

His peers seem to accept his potent self-assessment. In presenting Moss with a prestigious national award for his design of UC Irvine’s Central Housing Office, the American Institute of Architects praised him for “creating a building of powerful intensity. The architect challenges our perceptions of form and materials through the sharp angles of the roof, the juxtaposition of common with more elegant materials,” the jury statement says. “The building’s odd-shaped gabled roof mimics the styles seen in the surrounding detached houses and seems to rise and fall with the contours of the land.”

A striking feature of both the UC Irvine office and the Paramount Laundry conversion is the use of fat red clay sewer pipes as columns in a street-front arcade.

Punk Parthenon

The rows of 22-inch-diameter pipes are treated like classic colonnades, creating the shock of a punk Parthenon. The corner columns, thrust out at dog-leg angles, further diminish any cozy assumptions of architectural propriety.

This mixture of derision and respect characterizes Moss’ way with many architectural icons. In his designs, cheap particle board mimics marble and common steel reinforcing bars are sheathed in silver paint and used as elegant staircase handrails.

At the Paramount Laundry Building, a skewed metal hat mocks the corner tower. Playfully perverse, Moss makes the tower roof solid where it overhangs the outside wall, but cuts away the protective cap on the building’s interior. “Finding no shelter where you expect it, and vice versa, shakes the viewer out of his sleep,” he says.

Paramount project developer Fred Smith, whom Moss dubs “a proletarian capitalist,” lauds the architect’s adventurousness with forms and materials. “Eric understands futuristic geometries,” Smith says. “He respects what he finds in an old building, but is capable of giving it a modern twist. He’s a delightful personality who can be stubborn but is always alert.”

Moss maintains that his seeming design perversities are typical of modern art in every field. “When James Joyce wrote ‘Ulysses’ he used a Homeric mode of storytelling with a modern twist,” he says. “He recognized that the ancient forms were still valid, but the language that expressed them had atrophied.”

People were as shocked by Joyce’s fusion of old forms and new words as they are by a classical colonnade constructed of clay sewer pipes, Moss says.

Degree From Harvard

Moss’ seasoned face, as attractively quirky as his buildings, includes shrewd gray eyes that seem at odds with a generous mouth. Born and raised in Los Angeles, he returned to set up a practice here in 1975, after gaining a master’s degree from Harvard. Soon after arriving in Los Angeles, Moss fell under the influence of Frank Gehry and joined “The Gehry Kids,” a talented group of designers including Fred Fisher and Brian Murphy and the architectural firm Morphosis.

Today, Moss lives in Pacific Palisades, a district he describes as “an expensive emotional slum,” where he shares a boxy, renovated 1949 bungalow with his wife and two children. Outsize numerals painted on an addition over the garage parody his neighbors’ discreet street numbers. A false gable that looks like a cardboard cutout counterpoints a decorative flying buttress painted green with gold trim.

But it was another eccentric home renovation that put Moss on the international architectural map in the early ‘80s--his transformation of a 1940s Rancho Park tract bungalow into an architectural blossom called Petal House.

Unfold to Light

Segments of the second-story roof appear to unfold to the bright Los Angeles light, not unlike a sunflower. Inside the house, owned by Brad and Maritza Cuthbertson, a circular lobby topped by a cupola is played off against the original’s squat rectangles. This juxtaposition of contrasting volumes, often at odd angles, is typical of the Moss’ talent for giving new life to dead spaces. “I like to skew shapes, to give people a jolt,” he says.

In the UC Irvine housing office, Moss sets two roof lines at odds. The main shed roof, which looks slightly askew, is punctured by a series of pop-up gables that catch the eye of passers-by on a busy campus corner.

“Eric took a standard small office building and made it into an event,” says former Irvine campus architect David Neuman, who commissioned the design.

“The transformation is appropriate because it picks up the style of the surrounding campus bungalows, yet mocks their ordinariness. This playful yet serious mockery, which can be both bold and delicate, marks Moss as a true original.”