The Latest Alteration of a City’s Industrial Fabric

The fate of Eric Owen Moss rests with Culver City and its immediate surroundings. Armed with a long-standing alliance to a local developer, for a decade the architect has used a decaying manufacturing zone as testing-ground for his architectural fantasies, designing more than a dozen projects and building half. But Moss’ newest creation--an office building called Samitaur--attempts to fuse his twin obsessions: low-tech futurism and blue-collar values.

Sited at 3457 La Cienega, along the eastern edge of Culver City and overlooking South-Central Los Angeles, Samitaur is an 80,000-square-foot building with a radical plan: Rather than erase the existing industrial fabric, the 320-foot-long, two-story structure is balanced above it on columns. Kodak’s West Coast digital headquarters will move into the new structure next month, while a mix of tenants will occupy the intentionally mundane, renovated warehouses below.

But Samitaur is also a fragment of a grander experiment--the remarkable master plan Moss created for Culver City in 1991. Dubbed SPARCITY (for Southern Pacific Air Rights City, later renamed Palindrome), the plan proposed a string of offices elevated over a park and tram system that would trace a half-mile arc across Culver City in an effort to help the revitalization of Hayden Tract, Culver City’s warehouse district.

Industrial wastelands have long been the battleground of the avant-garde. During the 1960s, architect Cedric Price proposed integrating scattered fragments of a “portable” university into 100 square miles of a decaying north Staffordshire, near London. More recently, Steven Holl proposed a “Bridge of Houses” for Manhattan, a poetic housing scheme that was supposed to rest on the frame of Chelsea’s defunct El-train. Both remained lofty dreams.

But Moss is faced with a delicious opportunity: He may be able to make his vision real. Moss and his patron, developer Frederick Samitaur Smith, have already designed and filled more than 600,000 square feet of office space in and around Culver City, including another 55,000-square-foot building now under construction.

In the case of Samitaur, Moss’ fascination with the everyday is bluntly expressed. The building spans a fire lane between two existing warehouses--one brick, the other corrugated metal--which becomes a pedestrian passageway. At one end of the project, a box-like boardroom floats above an existing saw-toothed roof--a splendor of mid-century design. Visitors can peer down over the strikingly delicate roofscape and take in its subdued grandeur.

Rather than play on the inherent images of instability, Moss seems eager to reassure us that what is radical can also be stable--despite the region’s shaky ground. Massive structural images dominate: A series of giant girders support the new building and are themselves supported by fat steel columns that pierce the existing buildings below, firmly tying new and old together.

At times, Moss’ struggle to imbue the postindustrial city with new meaning suffers from pretentious flash. There are a series of calculated deformations in the design: an elaborate stair structure that clings to the building’s exterior like a parasite, a pentagon-shaped terrace that seemingly eats a hole through the facade, and, inside, the building’s sculptural bathroom core.

Each is marked by fussy gestures: The terrace centers around a circular fountain with an elaborate steel-grate bridge. Behind, a stair curls up to the rooftop. Above, wooden beams splay out without supporting anything. The simple clarity of the idea is obscured in the muddle.

At the building’s other end, the main stair structure is equally overwrought: Designed in the shape of a contorted cone, it is plastered with a pale-green patina and suddenly flares out at the bottom to provide a solid base. (There is one wonderful moment here: The stair’s cone-shaped top embraces a secretive bench where unrepentant smokers can enjoy their last rites.)

The bathroom core is the project’s most successfully subversive space because of its banal necessity. Normally primly hidden away, the bathrooms, with sculpted forms determined by the turning radius of a wheelchair, dominate the interior space. Air ducts twist and turn, and a balcony is cut around the galvanized-steel structure, making it a tempting place to loiter.

These are Moss’ decisive moments--the moments historian Antony Vidler refers to in the introduction to a recent monograph as “a world of half-ruins and fragments, shattered wholes and disseminated entities. . . .”

But what Vidler sees as “baroque” is not ecstatically sensuous. Stripped of its trendy ornament, the building would become powerfully simple. Instead, the schism between the simplicity of the idea and the overly indulgent decor is never healed. It seems as if Moss is trying desperately to distinguish his work from the nearby structures he professes to admire. He is shouting at us that this is art.

(An ironic footnote: Recently, Moss and developer Smith got in a tussle with the local art scene when they proposed applying the city’s allotment of “1% for art” to their own architectural projects, and in the minds of many stealing scarce art dollars for their own narrow ends.)

The notion that architecture needs flash to be architecture is deeply rooted--and it has been strengthened by the pervasiveness of magazines that crave glossy images, not thoughtful spaces. The wiliest architects build to be published, knowing that this is the straightest path to lucrative clients and fame.

Moss has the client. Smith still needs the tenants. The hope is that if the rest of Moss’ visionary plan comes to pass--if someday his ribbon of exotic urban forms becomes part of the permanent landscape of Culver City--that the fussy detailing will magically disappear. So far, few architects have the courage to allow their buildings to speak bluntly. On the other hand, few have the determination to make their visions real.