FUTURE PRESENCE

Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron

Architects, both 49

What they’ve done: The team, based in Basel, Switzerland, first came into prominence in the mid-’90s with the completion of two remarkable industrial buildings in their hometown: the Railway Engine Depot Auf dem Wolf, where trains are maintained, and SBB Signal Box 4, a control tower for the railway. The architects’ deceptively simple plans and unusual use of materials give the buildings a surreal--almost haunting--elegance. The Signal Box in particular was a tour de force, with the entire concrete structure wrapped inside hundreds of thin copper bands. Since the completion of those two projects, the firm’s rise has been meteoric. It has won competitions to design the Tate Gallery of Modern Art and the Laban Dance Center in London, San Francisco’s new De Young Museum, and a multiplex cinema complex in Basel.

Outlook for 2000: In the worlds of art and architecture, the opening of Herzog and De Meuron’s Tate Gallery of Modern Art is the most anticipated event of the year. The new annex to the museum, including 120,000-square-feet of gallery space, will be housed in a former power station on the edge of the Thames River. The design is remarkable for its clever restraint. A former turbine hall remains a raw factory-like space, with the addition of bridges crossing overhead that lead to various galleries. It will instantly become one of London’s grandest public rooms. Closer to home, the duo is expected to break ground on a much humbler project that may prove equally compelling--a Napa Valley house whose undulating glass walls artfully blend mountain views, domestic life and video images.

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Michael Maltzan

Architect, 40

What he’s done: Maltzan honed his architectural skills in the offices of Boston’s Machado and Silvetti and Los Angeles’ Frank O. Gehry. With Gehry, he was the project manager on such key projects as the Walt Disney Concert Hall. But in launching his own firm only four years ago, Maltzan quickly established his own architectural language, no mean feat for such a young talent. He recently completed the Feldman Horn Center for the Arts at Los Angeles’ Harvard Westlake School and the Hergott Shepard residence in Beverly Hills, which was featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s Un-Private House show this past summer. Both are works of remarkable spatial complexity that reveal a deep sensitivity to their context.

Outlook for 2000: With a little luck, Maltzan will break ground on three major projects in Los Angeles this year, all of them uniquely important civic buildings. He is completing the design for an addition to the downtown Inner City Arts complex, which would transform a quiet art program building into a vast creative sanctuary in an urban neighborhood. And construction begins on Pasadena’s Kidspace Museum late next fall, which Maltzan envisions as a series of interlocking galleries, theaters and classrooms in a park-like setting. But Maltzan’s most anticipated design will be unveiled in the spring: the renovation of the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of and Cultural Center, currently one of the city’s most ill-conceived spaces for viewing art.

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Eric Owen Moss

Architect, 56

What he’s done: Legendary architect Philip Johnson once dubbed Moss the “jeweler of junk,” and Moss certainly took the label as a compliment. During a 10-year partnership with developer Frederick Smith, Moss has renovated more than a dozen warehouse and manufacturing buildings in a once-decaying section of Culver City, creating a series of structures that seem to grow out of the old buildings like parasitic organisms. But Moss has also conceived the development as an artistic commune where projects like the Green Umbrella building, completed last year, can combine offices with an outdoor performance space to evoke the chaotic splendor of the creative imagination.

Outlook for 2000: With the completion next summer of his 15th project in Culver City--a theater and commercial office complex on Hayden Avenue dubbed the Stealth--the development finally reaches critical mass. Shaped like the faceted, jagged wing of a Stealth bomber, the design includes a 600-seat outdoor theater set precariously underneath the angular form of the offices. But the project will also bring unity to what is now a loose collection of buildings spread over a 1.2-square-mile manufacturing district. Perhaps more important to the evolution of Moss’ career, however, is that the architect is finally extending his vision beyond the boundaries of his Culver City neighborhood. He is at work on a mixed-use complex in Clerkenwell, England, and is on a short list of architects under consideration for the design of the new Los Angeles Children’s Museum, to be housed at a site to be determined.