Eric Owen Moss The rebirth of Culver City

TO CREATE a performance space and recording facilities for the L.A. Philharmonic, Moss merged two adjacent warehouses within the sprawling Culver City industrial tract. A transparent steel-spined roof stretches over a 25-seat outdoor amphitheater and a confluence of staircases. “The glass canopy — the umbrella — originally came from the name of the [Philharmonic’s] Green Umbrella concert series,” Moss says. “But among other things, it’s also an acoustic configuration to reshape the sound.” Certainly, Moss’s canopy bears much more resemblance to an umbrella battered by a stiff wind and blown off a cliff than to one freshly bought at Target. Alas, the Green Umbrella series didn’t enjoy too long a residence in Culver City before decamping for Walt Disney Concert Hall; after its departure, the project was remodeled to accommodate conference rooms, office space, and pre- and post-production facilities. “The umbrella remains there,” Moss says, “as a recollection of the process.”

MOSS HAS NEVER seen a particular resemblance between the supple dark gray sweep of his Culver City office building and the supple, dark gray sweep of a certain U.S. military spy jet. “That wouldn’t be my affinity,” he says, “although the project does seem to fly under the radar.” An architect friend from Vienna first noticed a strong connection and suggested the name. Moss, for his part, seems more preoccupied with the building’s continuously shifting geometry. “On the north end, it starts out as almost a Euclidean form,” he explains. “Then, as you follow it south, the shape changes with different tenant uses — from bigger spaces to smaller spaces to open spaces to enclosed spaces.” This shape-shifting, Moss observes, occurs on a millimeter-by-millimeter basis. “Remember that old Heraclitus saying, that you never step into the same river twice?” he asks. “This building is a manifestation of that.”

“SO, SOMETIMES these buildings have names,” Moss says. “It’s fun, it’s cute. But don’t think it should substitute for a substantive analysis of what the hell the building is. This building — there is something at least crudely pterodactyl about its form, in that it appears that it might leave the ground and that it might fly, and it might be fascinating, ominous, terrifying and an anachronism. And some of these things contradict each other.”

The project, designed for an advertising agency, included two levels of office space atop a four-story, 800-space parking structure. “What I did, essentially, was to drape the pterodactyl over the public face of the garage,” explains Moss, “which mitigates the effect of having to look at everybody’s Toyota and Prius and BMW or whatever. One piece of the project is extremely conventional. The other, less so.”

MOSS CONCEIVED the russet-colored bespoke home of Vespertine in collaboration with Jordan Kahn, the restaurant’s chef. Moss’s firm also designed the furniture, trays and pitchers for the eatery, where a tasting menu for two, including tax, tip, alcohol and other extras, can easily approach $1,000. “The ‘waffle’ nomenclature has to do with a kind of admixture of vertical and horizontal lines,” Moss says. “The vertical lines are constant. The horizontal lines get denser as the curves of the building become steeper.” Because of all this variation, the spaces created by the intersecting steel lines could not be filled in uniformly. Nor was uniformity ever the intention. “In a construction sense,” Moss says, “the building is both very progressive in terms of the software modeling and the technical side of it, and very 19th century in the sense that there were a billion individual pieces of glass that had to be cut and installed.”

MOSS’S MOST RECENT addition to Culver City’s renaissance is a frontal assault upon conventional-commercial-architectural wisdom. “What is a high-rise building?” he asks. “In an economic sense, it gets its meaning from its redundancy, its repetition, its efficiency. So when you build a building where every floor is different, and the framing is different on every floor, then you’re contradicting the conceptual premise of that kind of building by 179 degrees.” (W)rapper, Moss is quick to point out, has a parenthesis, and hence a double meaning. Some years ago, his son introduced him to the likes of Drake and N.W.A. “I like the idea that something that’s auditory could be physical, and something that’s physical could imply something that’s auditory,” Moss says. “Draw your own conclusions.”