“Umbrella,” Photo by Naquib Hossian

“Which is turned into a sort of analytical prospect with pieces like a chess game. But for the individuals who are part of this conflagration and had very little idea—and I think this is really Tolstoy’s point—it depends where you’re looking at it. You know, given a certain perspective you could probably analyze a conflict, ‘If these guys had only sent a battalion in this way and this cavalry in this way’ but for the people understanding it, for the guy who came back to his wife, if he came back, and said, ‘I have no idea what the hell happened!’ So what happened? What happened?”

What’s happening in Los Angeles, at least from the perspective of the people in this particular time and place, is an architectural renaissance. Moss’ structures are not about any particular socioeconomic movement, but rather about the space in between movements, that edgy global feeling of uncertainty and transition. When history is written for the early 21st American century, will we remember the kind of ambient terror accompanying the paradigm shift from adolescent nationality to global adulthood? Will Moss’ buildings puzzle the hell out of the future, or will they stand as elegant landmarks to the feeling of this transitory time?

Moss shows me his competition entry for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site. It features an abstracted version of a John Cage score and a quote from T.S. Eliot: ‘For last year’s words belong to last year’s language, and next year’s words await another voice.’

I ask him why he was drawn to Cage.

“It’s not so much literally what he did,” Moss says. “It’s what it provokes as a way of stretching the frame of reference in terms of what could music be. And that I really like. Because in the end, he turns it into both a prospect and a mystery. Which I like a lot—that ultimately it’s too mysterious to sort out, except in pieces. I think he does that, and I think I like to think about architecture that way. And I think the experience of living is like that.

“You know, you can’t teach architecture. Maybe you can make certain things possible, or certain sensibilities possible. I think Cage is really like that—it’s not clear, it’s not clear, and all of a sudden you hit something, and it works, and then it goes away again. And then you’re not sure, ‘How did I do that?’ And then you start thinking, ‘I know how I did that!’ and if you’re not careful—and I don’t think this ever happened to him—it turns into a method, into a rule system, and somebody starts teaching it and somebody starts learning it, and that’s the end.”

I thank him for the interview. He smiles.

“This is probably the most peculiar interview I ever did,” he says.

Agreed.

“Samitaur,” Photo by Scott Moore

Eric Owen Moss | Los Angeles, CA
Contributing Artist
http://www.ericowenmoss.com

---

BIO
Eric Owen Moss was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. He received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1965. Moss continued his education, earning his Masters of Architecture from the University of California at Berkeley, College of Environmental Design in 1968 and a second Masters of Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 1972. Eric Owen Moss was the recipient of the Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999. He received the AIA/LA Gold Medal in 2001 for the achievement of an outstanding body of architectural works. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architecture and was a recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award for the University of California, Berkeley in 2003.