In 1986, surging rents forced architect Eric Owen Moss ’65 to vacate his original office in Santa Monica. He ended up finding a spare floor in a warehouse in Culver City’s Hayden Tract, then a 60-acre, ramshackle wilderness of abandoned factories, industrial storage facilities and sheet metal shops. Moss liked the unorthodox approach that his landlords, Frederick and Laurie Samitaur Smith, had to developing the area. He began designing for the Smiths “as a way of reducing the rent,” he says. “That’s not an esoteric explanation. But that’s how it began.”
Together, Moss and the Smiths set about building what Moss termed “The New City” — a radical reimagining that saw decrepit concrete warehouse blocks transformed into some of the most phantasmagorical creative office space in America. The Ogilvy advertising agency was an early settler; starry media companies, a talent agency, a distillery, a software company, a pottery studio, a two-star Michelin restaurant and — ta-da! — Apple followed.
At 81, Moss continues to challenge (and polarize) the office building status quo. (W)rapper, his firm’s latest contribution to The New City, opened last year. Encased in what appears to be a deconstructed spiderweb of swooping steel, the startling office tower won Fast Company magazine’s “Innovation by Design Award.” Not everyone was so enamored. “If ever Hollywood needs a villainous headquarters for a dystopian, petrol-guzzling empire,” wrote the Guardian’s architecture and design critic, “this will be first in line.”
“If we’re spreading discomfort among people who are not comfortable with being uncomfortable, then we’re pushing the conversation forward,” Moss responds. “I’ll take that as a compliment.” It’s worth recalling that in his 2015 farewell address as the director at SCI-Arc, arguably the most iconoclastic architecture school ever conceived, he casually summed up his career by declaring, “I’m the enemy.”
With his steel-blue eyes and bushy gray hair, Moss gives off a certain Zen master vibe. But the wild acrobatics of his free associations seem to have much more in common with Beat poetry than Zen restraint.
“When we’re talking about building and architecture,” he observes in a typical flight of imagination, “the fact is that a crack is not necessarily a liability, or something pejorative, or a weakness. It might be, but it’s also an opening. Something can penetrate — come in or go out.”
Moss’ particular sense of exploration goes back to his undergrad days at UCLA. A course called Philosophy in Literature introduced him to Joyce, Beckett, Kafka and Dostoevsky, opening a portal for him into a life of the mind. “In a sort of fundamental way, by allowing me to investigate and interrogate with wonder and curiosity, UCLA was a perfect venue for me,” Moss says. “And if it didn’t completely satiate that thirst, at least it encouraged it.”
Take an interactive tour of Moss’ buildings:
Read more from UCLA Magazine’s Fall 2024 issue.