Eric Owen Moss : Buildings and Projects 2

Since his rise to international prominence over the past decade, award-winning Los Angeles architect Eric Owen Moss has continued to invent ways of conceiving space that defy conventional labels. Moss first gained renown for his work in a largely abandoned industrial zone of Culver City on the west side of Los Angeles. These early efforts were the impetus to his current large-scale remaking of the entire area, which has come to serve as a conceptual model for the return of architecture to postindustrial American cities.

This volume, a sequel to Rizzoli's Eric Owen Moss: Buildings and Projects (1991), presents twenty-five of Moss's latest built and unbuilt projects, illustrated with photographs, conceptual sketches and drawings, computer models, and plans. Among the works featured are new offices for the film and music company IRS; Warner Theater and Ince Theater at the edge of Culver City's burgeoning downtown; Vesey Street, a multiuse amphitheater in New York's Battery Park City; a housing project on two sites on Wagramerstrasse in Vienna; competition entries for the Nara Convention Center in Japan and a contemporary arts center in Tours, France; a multipurpose arena and urban renewal study for Havana's Plaza Vieja; and two private houses. Moss's accompanying project descriptions fuse his reflections on the work and sites with his architectural philosophy in an iconoclastic, personal voice. "This architecture is about discovery. It insists that the world can be other than it is," Moss says in his accompanying essay.

Anthony Vidler is a professor of Art History and Architecture at the University of California at Los Angeles and writes widely on architectural and urban history, theory, and criticism. His most recent books are The Architectural Uncanny (MIT, 1992) and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (MIT, 1990).