Eric Owen Moss
The leading architect on why L.A. is poised to be the city of the future
In 2006, the History Channel took the growing interest in urbanism and architecture another step and asked top thinkers and firms to submit large-scale projects for a serious-minded competition called "The City of the Future: A Design and Engineering Challenge," with a brief to re-imagine New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles. The winning project regarding L.A. was dreamed up by the team at Eric Owen Moss Architects, whose principal has worked in L.A. since 1973 and is one of the city's leading lights, building many distinctive projects including current works like the snakelike, twisting Conjunctive Points Theater Complex and the Gateway Art Tower planned for Culver City.
Models submitted for the competition show Moss's city of the future as a web of flowing, curvaceous structures strung along the L.A. River east of downtown, engulfing the river, the existing train yards, industrial buildings, and artist district and making them a single tissue with the adjacent East L.A. neighborhoods. It's not the only place this could happen, just one that seems imminently doable. This is a discussion beyond modernist furniture or cool prefab housing; this is big picture re-imagining of the city to make it livable and vibrant by meshing seamlessly with the highways, trains, and waterways that make it function. During a discussion at his office at the Sci-Arc campus east of downtown, Moss says, "I think we're looking at something in the next five to ten years which is extremely promising."
-Dean Kuipers
CityBeat: Let's talk about this model for city of the future: what am I looking at here?
Eric Owen Moss: I don't think this is an image-first discussion. It is a conceptual, organizational, public policy discussion. What's interesting about L.A. is that it has an international reputation for inventive, innovative, imaginative, re-imagined architecture. But the sense of the city is rarely that. My sense of the city is that what organizes it fundamentally is its enormous pieces of infrastructure. That means the ubiquitous L.A. River. It means train tracks being used, being abandoned, being reused. Tracks, freeways, power grids, river, all of which are very definitive in terms of zoning the city. What's east of the 405 and west of the 405, or what's west of the 110 and east of the 110, for instance. If you look where we're sitting at the moment, you've got downtown, you've got the tracks, you've got the river, and all of a sudden you've got a Hispanic area which might as well conceptually be miles and miles away...
East L.A.
It is virtually another city. Ultimately, the city is zoned in terms of purpose, and use, and economics, sociology, affluence, poverty, all of that. So, we argued: take the infrastructure, which is essentially uni-dimensional, meaning it was designed by an engineer to solve a technical problem - move a car, move water, move trains, move power. We would propose very large-scale structures and buildings, that is to say, infrastructure scale, based on the assumption that there is an enormous investment in those pieces. We would redefine the river, redefine the tracks, redefine the freeway, redefine the power grids and these rights-of-ways, in a way which would make what is a divider or a barrier into a unifier or a connecter.
Is there any reason why you used this area right along the river?
It is a particularly active zone where there are a whole series of questions that remain to be resolved. There's the river. You have the railroad tracks; they're sitting there as an enormous hunk of land. There's a dying industrial zone towards East L.A. that's a goddamn wreck. What we put over there, we called the NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] Drape. Assuming what is there now essentially is on its way to Guangzhou, Manila, Laredo, Taipei, that it isn't intelligent for America to de-industrialize itself, but what would go over there could be a subject of debate. It could be robotics. It could be pharmaceuticals. You're sitting next to County USC hospital. You also have the opportunity to link to the port. This allows that manufacturer to make use of the Hispanic area, which is a potentially underemployed area.
There's also this new [ex-Gov. Michael] Dukakis piece, which is this high-speed rail which he's been running around and pushing. The assumption is that we would run that through this zone and connect it to the train station downtown and run it right on up to San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, Anchorage. Very simple, logical, programmatically intelligible.
This is an artist's district. It would change substantially in terms of density and purpose, but it wouldn't entirely ignore the people who have a history here. Big park. This is a city with zero parks, aside from Griffith Park. So, part of what we proposed to be lifted over this area is a piece that goes over the top of these buildings, over the road and over the track, which has housing but it also has an enormous park, and it goes to the edge of the river. We designed a structure that could be hooked over the bridges, which could hold photovoltaics and additional buildings, over the freeways, that actually is a mechanism to amend the infrastructure, not to get rid of it. So you're knitting the city back together.
You're talking about abandoning planning cities one building at a time.
In a certain sense it's very far from realizable, and in another sense it could be realized almost automatically. The scale of the problem is substantial, and therefore the scale of the solution can't be ultimately building-by-building. Then when you look at Katrina, this is another piece of the mental equation: the lack of interest in public policy-related big decisions in cities is a tremendous flaw regarding what America might become. Gangs, or the Santa Monica Freeway at 8 at night, or a public school system which is a complete disgrace - those sorts of issues, over a long period of time, have enormous consequences. Transportation, education, housing need to be an essential piece of the conception of what the country will become. I don't have a sense that they are.
There's a coalescing of city policymakers now, which would give you more of a chance to imagine the city at a larger scale and have a chance to implement. People in cities, not so long ago, wouldn't contemplate that re-conception of the city. Hell, now Beverly Hills seems to be very interested in this "dig up Wilshire" project.
All of a sudden the trains are popular.
And Beverly Hills wants it to stop on Rodeo Drive, you know? I'm not saying all those problems are immediately solvable. I'm not so sure the way it looks gives final sense to what the city should be - meaning it's not so much whether it's the Ringstrasse or the Champs-Elysées or something like that. I think what we're really talking about are the organizational components. I don't see any reason why Los Angeles, which has come to be the epitome for invention in architecture, couldn't in the next phase be the epitome for invention in contemporary urbanism. We should do it.
Is the L.A. Department of City Planning's new Urban Design Studio a step toward solving these problems?
What's more available now, is an agreement, a sense, that in order to solve big problems and to work on a substantial scale, the people who are involved and interested, whatever their specialty, have to talk to each other. So Jan Perry can talk to [Deputy Mayor] Bud Ovrom. Bud Ovrom can talk to the developer. Antonio Villaraigosa and Eli Broad can talk to public policy makers and designers all over the city. You've got [Los Angeles River Artists and Business Association President] Tim Keating, Charlie Woo, business guys who have been in the area for a long time, who have a lot to say. It is a fairly ecumenical conversation, and I think that if the city starts to make departments that can respond to some of these questions, you have a chance to make it work. I'm less interested in the curriculum side, I have to say, and more interested in the personality side
Published: 01/25/2007
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