A chunky grey staircase thrusts out from the side of a new office tower in Los Angeles, lunging towards a rail line before jerking back on itself and lurching up the building in jagged twists and turns. It crashes into a warped lattice of bands that wrap around the glassy hulk, swooping past corner windows that jut in and out like broken teeth. This is (W)rapper, “an outrageous creative office tower”, in the words of its leasing agents, set to “reawaken the Los Angeles skyline”. It is also the bombastic tombstone of a bygone era, a carbon-guzzling monument to a time when architectural ego trumped the interests of people and planet.
It is the first vertical element to sprout from an eccentric district of low-rise creative workspace that has been developing here in Culver City, on LA’s west side, over the last few decades. This 60-acre swath of former warehouses, known as the Hayden Tract, is an exhibition of architectural experimentation, a place where windows slant, columns convulse and globular protuberances burst out of walls. Rippling glass canopies erupt through rooftops, held on mangled knots of steel, while other structures are flayed open or gnawed down to their bones, their exposed skeletons mutilated beyond recognition. It looks like the buildings have been attacked by some flesh-eating bacteria or succumbed to a violent parasitic invasion.
The name of the virulent strain in question is Eric Owen Moss. The 79-year-old architect has been cutting, twisting and otherwise creatively torturing this tract of postwar industrial sheds since the 1980s, like a medieval mason chipping away at his model town. The result is an office district like no other, a place where a single architectural imagination has been left to run riot, conjuring ever-more elaborate fever dreams, fuelled by the open chequebook of a trusting patron.
“You could say they’re like the Medicis,” says Moss, referring to Frederick and Laurie Samitaur Smith, a former scriptwriter and dancer couple who have indulged his contorted fantasies for the last four decades. Frederick, who died in 2019, was once an assistant to Pablo Picasso and began building speculative offices in northern California in the 1970s, in what would become Silicon Valley. He inherited some industrial buildings from his father in Culver City and, with his wife, set about transforming this rundown tract into a mecca for the creative industries.
“They understood how to utilise architecture as an incentive, as seduction,” says Moss, “as something to distinguish from this infinite sea of industrial brick and precast concrete.” The tactic worked and the ad agencies, tech companies and post-production studios flocked here, in a Richard Florida dream of the creative class in action. Over the years, Ogilvy, Sony, Kodak, Apple and Nike have all been lured here, taking space in buildings that Moss christens with quirky nicknames, like creatures in his psychotropic petting zoo.
There is Stealth, a glowering battleship; Beehive, a crooked cocoon; Pterodactyl, a cluster of cubes piled on top of a parking garage; Slash and Backslash, two sheds hacked open in opposite directions. “The city’s reaction has been: What are you guys smoking?” says Moss. “But, by and large, they let us get on with it.” They’ve done more than that: the local regulations were adapted to allow the projects to qualify as public art, enabling Moss to enjoy the extra 1% of the budget that’s usually reserved for an art commission.
For the most part, the buildings are cheap and cheerful. They deploy everyday materials with energetic abandon, making cinder blocks twist, plywood curve and wooden trusses explode apart with Gordon Matta-Clark glee. As the late star-anointing architect Philip Johnson put it, Moss is the “master jeweller of junk”. It feels very LA, raiding the set designer’s toolbox: a dark metal facade turns out to be painted plaster, while a sculpted concrete roof is actually spray-on fibreglass.
“We like how things are made,” enthuses Dolan Daggett, who has worked with Moss since 1996. “It’s a modernist ethos of cheap things put together well. But ‘less is more’ is not on our door.”
The follies haven’t always gone to plan. A cor-ten steel “information tower”, built in 2010 as a climbable multimedia beacon and featuring video art projected on to curved acrylic panels, has been out of order for years. It stands chained off, like an abandoned relic from a World Expo site – of which, on a quiet afternoon, the whole tract is eerily reminiscent.
As the district has grown, so have Moss’s ambitions, and budgets. Once confined to Culver City (one of the autonomous cities in LA), the architectural anarchy has now broken from its cage, leapt across the street into the City of Los Angeles proper and jumped up a scale. The “junk” has become millions of dollars’ worth of double-curved steel and high-performance glazing, in the shape of the architect’s most inflated sculptural gesture yet.
Standing 70 metres high, (W)rapper is visible on the skyline for miles around, one of the few towers to poke up from the low-rise urban sprawl. Named like a 1990s hip-hop artist, with the retro styling to match, the project has a similar vintage. “This is a 20-year-old building,” Moss grunts, his gravelly voice echoing across the 14th floor of the empty tower, where views stretch from the sparkling Pacific to the snow-capped mountains. “Even older, if you go back to its origins.”
He is referring to an installation he made in 1998 called Dancing Bleachers, at the Wexner Centre for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, a building designed by fellow deconstructivist architect, Peter Eisenman. Moss inserted a series of curved steel bands inside the gallery, in geometric opposition to the building’s orthogonal grid structure, imposing a conceptual “centre” on Eisenman’s “centreless” grid – an intellectual game between two warring egos and their arcane theories.
For (W)rapper, Moss began a similar geometric battle with himself, inscribing a series of concentric arcs across the site, then wrapping them on to the facade of the tower, folding them over and back on themselves, to create the criss-crossing lattice of intersecting curves. The visual result recalls Herzog & de Meuron’s Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing, chopped into pieces and hastily squashed against the sides of a glass tower. But Moss had more highbrow sources in mind.
“It goes back to a poem by Yeats,” he says, citing The Second Coming, which includes the line “the centre cannot hold”. It is one of the many references he casually invokes throughout our conversation, from Moby-Dick to Dionysus and Apollo, the paintings of Gustave Courbet and Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser. I ask him about deconstructivism, the 1980s style of architecture with which he is associated, to which he responds that he prefers the term “dialectical lyric”.
So, besides Yeats, where did this tower come from? “We thought, ‘What if we took all of the warehouse spaces in Culver City and stacked them on top of each other?’” says Moss, describing the building’s open, flexible office floors with varying ceiling heights. “There’s no columns in this goddam thing! So if you’re a tenant, you can do any goddamn thing you want – partition it floor to ceiling, or turn it into a goddamn bowling alley!”
The floors, which range from four to seven metres in height, sit on deep steel I-beams that connect to the curved bands in the facade – sometimes bursting through them and sometimes missing them altogether, having to be connected by additional horizontal steel “bandaids”. The bands are made from rolled steel plate, ranging from 1-7cm thick, made in China and welded into hollow box sections, joined at the corners with 30cm-thick solid steel nodes, made in Germany. The steel is coated with lumpy cementitious fireproofing, while the circulation core and base are rendered with rough grey plaster, giving the whole edifice a rugged, concretey texture. The result is a menacing thing, cranking up Moss’s cyberpunk tendencies to new high-octane levels. If ever Hollywood needs a villainous headquarters for a dystopian petrol-guzzling empire, this will be first in line – with a carbon footprint to match.
The production of steel emits more carbon dioxide than any other structural material, with each tonne of this kind producing around three tonnes of CO2. (W)rapper uses 5,400 tonnes of steel, equating to 300 kg per square metre, which is around three times as much as a typical steel-framed high-rise should usually require. For new office buildings in the UK, meanwhile, engineers aim to limit embodied carbon to around a fifth of what was emitted for this project. Daggett says the structure is designed for ultimate earthquake resilience, and it is the only high-rise office building in the US that sits on seismic base isolators. But it is hard to think the formal acrobatics were worth the environmental cost.
“Is that the only measure of architecture now?” says Moss, when I raise the carbon question. “Awards all focus on sustainability, but our conceptual conversations are more intricate than that. There’s a poetic point, an emotional point, an experiential point.” Yet the experiential poetry also falls short. To achieve the feat of column-free interiors, the spectacular view has been sacrificed, blocked by the hefty bands that clunk past the windows. Besides, few tenants ever require such uninterrupted space: even the suggested layout in the leasing brochure depicts a regular grid of desks and meeting rooms. The whole project feels like a bloated anachronism, an outmoded dream of the “creative office”, unveiled post-pandemic, at a time when vacancy rates have rarely been higher.
Moss may like to operate on a higher conceptual plane, but why should we care about the hermetic theories behind his big steel pile? “That’s a fair question,” he shrugs. “Does anybody give a shit? Is anybody listening? Maybe three people we know, one in London, one in Shanghai. But I think the effect of it is what interests me. It’s an opportunity to show there are other ways to imagine.” He narrows his eyes, as if summoning a momentous truth. “What you see isn’t all there is to see. Can you listen for things you haven’t heard?”
Back in his studio, whose front door bears a blunt steel phallus for a door handle, I see models of forthcoming towers planned nearby. There is one nicknamed Turtle, which twists from a circular base to a rectangular top, and one like a row of glass grain silos, melted into an amorphous lump and perched on a big tube. A third, even more speculative proposition rises twice the height of the others, a helical beanpole with observation decks sprouting from the top, like an air traffic control tower on acid – humbly named after the Roman emperor Trajan.
Moss is right: there is more to see than we have seen. But it might be better for all of us if it remained unseen, left safely on the drawing board as curious relics of a time when architecture occupied an autonomous fantasy realm while the planet burned.
