Manipulating the Myths of Suburbia

Few Los Angeles architects have risen faster and fallen harder than Eric Owen Moss. During the 1980s, architects such as Thom Mayne, Michael Rotondi, Franklin Israel and Moss were touted as the future of the profession. Their work--dynamic, jagged designs that sometimes seemed close to breaking apart at the seams--were viewed as apt metaphors for the disintegration of American society. And Moss, the most cerebral of the group, was their intellectual leader.

But by the mid-1990s that promise had all but fizzled. Israel, one of the most talented of the group, died from complications of AIDS in 1996. Rotondi, a founder of the architectural firm Morphosis, appeared to be headed toward professional obscurity and has yet to land a major commission. Even Mayne, now an established star, struggled with his career until he resurfaced two years ago with the opening of the celebrated Diamond Ranch High School in Pomona.

Moss, meanwhile, was drifting into an increasingly hermetic universe, completing a series of idiosyncratic projects in an isolated, former manufacturing district in Culver City owned by developers Frederick and Laurie Smith. These works, mostly small additions that cling to existing structures like parasitic organisms, marked Moss as an eccentric outsider, one who seemed destined to end up as an obscure, somewhat bizarre footnote to L.A.’s rich architectural history.

Now Moss’ star is on the rise again. In December, the 58-year-old architect won an international competition to design a renovation and expansion for the Queens Museum of Art in New York, his first major commission outside Los Angeles. In January, he was named director of the Southern California Institute for Architecture, one of the region’s most progressive design schools.

And with the completion in December of his latest work, the Stealth Building, Moss seems to be resurfacing as an architect concerned with the world outside his head. Located at 3528 Hayden Ave. in Culver City, the project is a provocative reworking of the conventional suburban office block. Its sleek, chiseled forms are pulled and twisted, recalling a rational world deformed by unconscious urges. Perhaps more important, the project’s relationship with the surrounding buildings suggests a new urban model, an alternative to the quaint reproductions of small-town America that now dominate the profession.

The project is the latest addition to an existing Moss-designed office park, set around a landscaped parking lot. Along one side, two existing warehouses have been transformed into advertising offices, their facades partially sliced away and reclad in enormous sheets of glass. Opposite, a small performance space is embedded in the facade of another warehouse building. The performance space’s steps, protected under sheets of undulating glass, cascade down from the building’s corner like a gigantic, airborne jellyfish.

The new building, which forms the entry to this complex, is actually two interlocking structures, one old, the other new. An existing, one-story factory shed extends along the street at ground level, its interior transformed into a series of loft-like offices. The new two-story structure rests atop this space, propped up on a series of slender I-beam columns. At one end, its hulking form spans a narrow driveway, creating a portal to parking in back.

Seen from the street, the Stealth is a tough building to love. A bland parking lot, interspersed with smaller patches of lawn, faces the street. The building’s dark, faceted facade looms above, looking like the bomber it was named after. Two large cylinders, painted a crude silver, carve up through the core of the building, anchoring it to the site.

But the design’s impact stems from its ability to conjure up old suburban myths, both soothing and disturbing. The patches of lawn are a play on notions of suburban tranquillity. The building’s facade, which transforms from a conventional office block at one end to a menacing, wing-like form at the other, embodies the tension between America’s economic confidence and the military industrial complex that remains such an important part of it.

Those tensions are reflected in the building’s interiors as well, which are conceived as a series of distinct zones. The building’s south wing, for example, is surprisingly subdued. Rows of glass boxes line the back wall, with simple square windows overlooking the office park in back. On the lower floor, the long strip window narrows to a point at one end, the only hint of the building’s dynamic exterior.

At its other end, however, the offices begin to break apart. The building’s front wall protrudes out toward the street, tearing free of the floor slab. The third floor becomes a mezzanine, with views down through a long, canted strip window to the street below. Above, a second strip of windows allows light to spill down onto both floors. The entire wall is braced by a series of canted steel columns, heightening the sense of vertigo.

These two wings are joined via a central lobby terrace, which is partially open to the outdoors. The lobby is framed by the canted facade, which is braced by more steel columns. Above, a fragment of a ribbon window reappears, forming a glass canopy over the double-height space. A heavy, internal bridge passes overhead, linking the two third-floor office wings. The idea is to create a compact “social condenser,” where office workers can loiter, mingle and escape the suffocating ennui of their daily lives.

Such spaces recall the work of the late New York artist Gordon Matta Clarke, who carved apart abandoned townhouses with a chain saw, an act that served as a powerful metaphor for the social upheavals and generational conflicts of the 1970s.

Moss’ work is not as graceful as Matta Clark’s. Nor is it as compelling a work of social commentary. But its underlying themes are similar: the release of repressed, unconscious forces; the struggle for individual expression and social instability.

But in the end, the quality of Moss’ individual designs may be less important than the originality of his urban vision.

During the past decade, architects have felt increasingly free to create buildings that are radical expressions of the contemporary condition. Urban planners, meanwhile, have retreated into a neo-traditional vision of the city: pedestrian enclaves that ooze with the nostalgia of a Norman Rockwell painting.

Moss’ loosely knit collection of architectural baubles offers a less facile alternative. Seen from the terraces of the Stealth building, the relationship between Moss’ strange additions and the existing landscape has a surprising harmony. With each new addition, that sense of balance only promises to get stronger.

As such, the development represents an urban ideal that is less homogenous and more tolerant than the norm. It is a world where the outcast, the oddball and the eccentric coexist with the rational, the mainstream and the conventional.

Years from now, that idea may well turn out to be Moss’ most lasting contribution to architecture.

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Nicolai Ouroussoff is The Times’ architecture critic.