A Journey Into L.A.’s ‘Gnostic’ Experience

The familiar landscape of Los Angeles turns into something rich and strange when viewed through the eyes of an authentic visionary in “Gnostic Architecture” by Eric Owen Moss (Monacelli Press, $45, 160 pages). An architect with a global reputation, the Culver City-based Moss has chosen a building near Baldwin Hills to illustrate his own idiosyncratic notions of urban design.

The label that Moss applies to his approach to architecture is drawn from the realm of religion and philosophy. Gnosticism, as Moss explains it, is “a way of knowing” that is achieved “internally, person by person, one person at a time.” He uses the term to describe himself and his work--”an intellectual dialectic and a lyrical resolution,” as he puts it--precisely because he seeks to break out of the lock-step of conventional design and construction.

“Gnostic architecture,” explains Moss, “is a strategy for keeping architecture in a perpetual state of motion.”

To help us understand what he means, Moss invites us to ponder one of his own projects, an office block dubbed “Samitaur” after the company that built it. As we see for ourselves in the book, the building is an eye-catching and even soul-stirring structure, highly functional and yet crammed with seemingly contradictory ideas and expressions--somehow, it manages to be airy and massive at the same time, monumental in scale and yet handcrafted in detail. The structure rises up and hangs over the faceless buildings that were already in place at the site, a post-modern fortress looming over the bleak commercial flatlands.

Samitaur is depicted in a series of full-page architectural photographs and drawings, all of them rhapsodic or heroic or sometimes both at once. But the glory of “Gnostic Architecture” is to be found in a provocative essay by Moss and an encyclopedia of iconic imagery that informs the imagination of the architect himself--a ballet dancer by Degas, a Spanish colonial plaza in Havana, a cave painting at Altamira, a yellow toy dump truck, a page from James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” the famous image of a man stopping a tank in Tiananmen Square, all of them reproduced in postage-stamp scale.

Just about everything in “Gnostic Architecture,” in fact, is slightly off the wall. The shape of the book is a slightly woozy trapezoid rather than a neat rectangle. The title runs off the right margin and picks up again on the opposite side of the page, a typographical flourish that suggests the book is called “Gnostic Architect.” Even the page numbering is slightly encoded. Any architect who dares to compare his work to an arcane theological doctrine is taking a certain risk--does he actually build ivory towers, we might wonder, or does he merely inhabit one? But the fact is that Moss is one Gnostic who lives and works in the here-and-now, where politics are just as important as aesthetics.

“If you were to make a development proposal in Westwood,” he observes, “there would be hearings for five years, and perhaps never a built project.” Because Samitaur was built on the outskirts of South-Central, where new jobs and new construction are so scarce, his daring architectural conceit is now an accomplished fact.

“The ‘nowhere’ of La Cienega and Jefferson,” concludes Moss, “has now become a ‘somewhere.’ ”

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A more playful but no less beguiling view of the Southland is offered in “City of Angels: In and Around Los Angeles” by Julie Jaskol and Brian Lewis with illustrations by Elisa Kleven (Dutton, $16.99, 48 pages). Here are 20 slices of life in Los Angeles, ranging from Chinatown to the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance, each one celebrated in a burst of prose and a “Where’s Waldo”-style illustration. To their credit, the authors have included not only the old and emblematic sights--Olvera Street, Watts Towers, the La Brea Tar Pits--but also some less familiar venues, such as the African American community of Leimert Park Village, and some of the very newest attractions, including the Getty Center. “City of Angels” is an elegant souvenir for visitors, a perfect gift for out-of-town friends and relations, and a surprisingly useful guidebook for those of us who may have forgotten some of our own hometown pleasures.