Los Angeles, California, USA
Lauded as a visionary amongst his American contemporaries and one of the leading Los Angeles architects who have set the tone, if not the mood of today’s new Los Angeles Architecture, Eric Owen Moss has been selected as this year’s Laureate of The American Prize for Architecture by both The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
The 40-year-old firm of Eric Owen Moss Architects has created some of Los Angeles’ best and freshest new architecture, particularly The Samitaur Tower, The Waffle, The Cactus Tower, and the warehouse renovations, 3555 and Stealth, in California’s Culver City where the firm is based.
These iconic works are not just exemplary works of architecture, but the firm has also managed to rejuvenate entire areas of the blighted city where the buildings are built.
“His buildings appear geometrically simple, but are infused with theory and purpose,” states architecture critic and President/CEO of The Chicago Athenaeum.
“His work in his usual and famous Kafkaesque approach simultaneously fosters an insatiable curiosity into what makes him tick; and even more, what makes this ticking turn into such astounding architecture.”
“The firm’s buildings are quite easy to spot, but difficult to compartmentalize. They constitute a clash of forms where surfaces collide, rupture, twist, bend, split, melt, and explode out of control—all to avoid even remotely any kind of suggestion of a design methodology of any kind.”
“Moss and his firm’s forward-thinking approach, deep commitment to the ‘art of space-making,’ and the architect’s singular devotion to the urban environment and to urban revival, passion if you will, have been evidenced since the late 1970s.”
“His works, particularly in Culver City, have redefined urban intervention, not with the sole aim of making declining areas of the city more presentable, but remaking and reinventing these areas as visionary postindustrial urban spaces with a panache for leading, not following growing and expanding residential and working development.”
“Eric Owen Moss is widely recognized for his visionary designs around the world.”
Established in 1994, The American Prize for Architecture, also known as The Louis H. Sullivan Award, is given to an outstanding office and/or practitioner in the United States that have emblazoned a new direction in the history of American Architecture with talent, vision, and commitment and has demonstrated consistent contributions to humanity through the built environment and through the art of architecture.
The Award, organized jointly by two public institutions, The Chicago Athenaeum and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies, honors American architects, as well as other global architects practicing on a multiple of continents, whose body of architectural work, over time, exemplifies superior design and humanist ideals.
It also broadcasts globally the significant contributions of America’s rich and inspiring architecture practice and its living legacy to the world at large.
Previous American Prize Laureates include: Sir Norman Foster, Michael Graves, the General Services Administration, Richard Meier, Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, Form4Architecture, and James von Klemperer of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates PC.
Last year, the Prize was given to Bernardo Fort-Brescia and Laurinda Spear of the Miami-based firm of Arquitectonica.
Eric Owen Moss was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1943.
He received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1965, his Masters of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, College of Environmental Design in 1968, and a second Masters of Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 1972. Moss has been teaching at Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) since 1974 and served as director from 2002 to 2015. He has held chairs at Yale and Harvard universities, and appointments at Columbia University, the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.
Eric Owen Moss Architects, also known as EOMA, was founded in 1973.
The work of the office has been thoroughly documented in books, monographs, and publications internationally, including the 1,568-page Eric Owen Moss Construction Manual published by AADCU in 2009.
Since 1986, the EOMA team has been working with developers Frederick and Laurie Samitaur Smith to transform an abandoned industrial neighborhood into a campus for creative-minded companies.
Today, the Hayden Tract and surrounding neighborhood attract some of the most successful design, film, internet, and digital media companies in the world.
Moss received an Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999. He was awarded the 2001 AIA/LA Gold Medal for his architectural work as well as the Business Week/ Architectural Record Award in 2003 for the design and construction of the Stealth project in Culver City.
He received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of California at Berkeley in 2003. In 2007, he received the 2007 Arnold Brunner Memorial Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2011, he was awarded the Jencks Award, given each year to an architect who has made a major contribution to theory and practice of architecture by the Royal Institute of British Architects. In 2014, Moss was named a “Game Changer” by Metropolis Magazine. In 2016, Moss was awarded the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art.
Moss has also won numerous American Architecture Awards and International Architecture Awards from The Chicago Athenaeum.
For over 35 years, Moss and his associates have been chipping away the former industrial Culver City and turning the former light manufacturing area, into a thriving, cutting-edge creative urban hub.
Started in 1986, the project’s master plan, called “The New City,” proposed 43 buildings in the Hayden Tract in Culver City.
More than half of the buildings have been completed, with several recognized as outstanding public art.
“Behind every visionary architect is an equally visionary client,” states Narkiewicz-Laine.
The success of Moss and his firm are also due to the astute developers Frederick and Laurie Samitaur Smith, who invested in warehouses owned in Hayden Tract and who also saw architecture as an art form. The couple worked with Moss to transform the derelict spaces into offices that would attract creative-minded companies.
This fruitful, unique relationship started when Frederick Smith started buying up run-down commercials buildings and needed an architect to redesign and renovate several warehouses. The idea was to burrow deeply into an overlooked and built-out industrial neighborhood and transform it from the inside out.
Launching the concept of creative office space and positioning architecture as a method to uncover new social and civic opportunities. Re-inventing the city and reusing former industrial buildings and repurposing the industrial aesthetic was a “win, win” situation from the outset.
“Moss and his buildings and his ideas gave these formerly blighted areas a sudden recognizable luster and a sudden freshness that only superb architecture can easily acquiesce,” states Narkiewicz-Laine.
Today, the Hayden Tract is an architectural wonderland occupied by some of the most artistic companies in the world, such as Nike, Converse, The Tennis Channel, and advertising giant Ogilvy and Mather.
“A kind of new Columbus, Indiana, if you will.”
“Urban renaissance, nonetheless. Moss and his clients buried the old Culver City for good.”
Hayden Tract contains many of Eric Owen Moss’ signature buildings that have garnered endless critical acclaim, striking examples of exceptional architectural thinking and a truly bold cosmopolitan approach.
“His buildings never appear loud or assuming, but are infused with absolute lyrical poetry.”
“This architect’s avant-garde approach is fluid, adjusting in response to the needs and influences of each environment through a concept of interrelated time and form.”
“He never merely replicated the status quo, but his search for meaningful architecture is reflected in his buildings that to this day, are constantly evolving, and always fresh in their approach and contribute greatly to the livability and health of the urban environment in which they are destined.”
“Moss’ living experiment in Culver City and beyond confirms his status as perhaps the most essential, and the most authentic, of America’s masters of contemporary design,” Narkiewicz-Laine concludes.