The Samitaur Tower is an information tower, constructed at the corner of Hayden Avenue and National Boulevard immediately across from the new Expo light rail line arriving from downtown Los Angeles in June, 2011. That intersection is the primary entry point into the re-developed zone of Culver City. Conceptually, the tower has both introverted and extroverted planning objectives. Internal to the burgeoning site area of new media companies, graphic designers, and general office tenants, the...

The “If Not Now, When?” exhibit at SCI-Arc scheduled in May thru September 2009, re-examines both the content of the Wexner exhibition, in which the galleries present the grid as floor, as wall, as roof, and as structure, and the premises of the Glass Tower at La Cienega and Jefferson. The ubiquitous grid of the surrounding concrete gallery space, and, by implication, the enduring grid pro forma that continues to inhabit the planning and architecture...

The design for the building on the W2 lot of the New Campus for the Vienna University of Economics and Business addresses the organizational and functional concerns of the master-plan, and introduces unique spatial qualities and relationships with the Prater – a wooded area located to the south of the W2 site – the rest of the campus, and the ‘Squares and Places’ that occupy various points along the ‘Academy Promenade’. The building houses Academic...

The current Hayden Tower proposal, scheduled to begin construction in October, 2008, abandons the triangular, single-story volume with roof-top parking, and substitutes the two, original warehouse structures, to be remodeled rather than demolished as in the original two schemes. The 60 year old, steel frame structure which once enclosed the industrial press on the site is to be retained, with the metal panel enclosure removed, exposing the original frame and bracing. A translucent proscenium curtain...

The original Jefferson Towers project – two 235 foot high-rise towers and parking – was approved by the Los Angeles City Planning Commission and the Los Angeles City Council in 1999. At the time of its original approval the only high rise proposal in the South Central Los Angeles area, the location for two urban riots in the last fifty years. Today the project continues to be the only tower proposal in that section of...

The Parking Structure and Retail Project for 8511 Warner Drive will provide parking for new area businesses in 'Conjunctive Points', Culver City, California. The project will also serve the local residential and business community by providing a modest amount of retail and restaurant space -- 50,000 square feet -- currently lacking in the area. 'Conjunctive Points' was developed as a manufacturing and industrial area in mid-century, served by both trucks and a surface rail. Over...

PAST AND FUTURE. EUROPE AND ASIA. PERMMUSEUMXXI represents a historic moment for the new Perm, the separation of the City’s past from the City’s future. Today Perm understands itself differently. And the world will soon understand that difference. The Perm Art Gallery belongs to the future. The closed city is now the open city, and the new museum marks that transition iconically. A transition in the City’s life means new purpose, new energy, new optimism,...

3555 Hayden's site context is comprised largely of underdeveloped industrial and warehouse buildings. With the new addition, the building will function as the headquarters for a national broadcast company. This project is part of the ongoing Conjunctive Points development, an urban scale collaboration between the architect and developer which includes a business complex and multiple commercial and cultural projects. The primary zoning constraint for the project was the stipulated 43’ height limit. The form of...

The primary organizational components that define contemporary Los Angeles are enormous works of civil engineering - the railway tracks and bridges; the power grids; the "v" shaped, concrete L.A. River; and the ubiquitous steel and concrete freeways. The infrastructure, when successful, solves the technical objectives of its design engineers: moves trains; moves power; moves water; moves cars. But in Los Angeles technical means often become both visual ends and operational limits the original problem solvers...

The Balandra project gives the opportunity to conceive a city on the [almost] untouched Balandra Bay in the Sea of Cortez. But what city? The coastal city? Or the Mexican coastal city? Or the Mexican coastal resort city? Or the Mexican coastal resort ecological city? The intervention plan seems to imply altering, to some degree, the original, invaluable experience of the site. So the question is, is it possible to both preserve and to alter...

Located directly adjacent to the former capitol building of The Republic of Kazakhstan, the Republic Square project is the major component of large-scale, city-wide development. The project consists of approximately 126,000 sq. meters of retail, office, hotel, and residential uses. At the ground floor, a new city plaza is created within a 38 meter diameter spiral. This enclosed plaza or “winter garden” connects the former capitol site to the west with large scale retail and...

The city of Guangzhou is growing at an unprecedented rate, particularly in a southern direction toward the Pearl River. The site area of the new Guangdong Museum and Opera House offers a unique planning opportunity to resolve this rapid urban growth where the expanding city meets the Pearl River, and to provide residents and visitors to the city with a new and unprecedented experience of art and culture. We propose two conceptual design metaphors for...

The Conjunctive Points Theater Complex is a mixed-use development that will synergistically join art and technology through the creation of unique and innovative state-of-the-art theaters. Set against the backdrop of intellectually stimulating office, retail and restaurant space, the result will be numerous coordinated venues for commerce and the expression of the arts. The project also will provide substantial areas for public use including an amphitheater, south-facing plaza, and park. To minimize the building footprint, the...

"The Patent Office Building, an American cultural treasure and National Historic Landmark..." The design solution for the enclosure of the Patent Office Building Courtyard offers a remarkable oppurtunity for the Smithsonian Institution, and its chosen architects, to re-confirm the building's unique institutional and architectural pedigree - "America's temple to the industrial arts" - by adding a dramatic contemporary chapter to the building's history. Fortuitously, the building's original purpose - the display of inventor's models submitted...

José Vasconcelos Library of Mexico – – Not Just A Building The National Library of Mexico City is not simply a significant addition to the city center. Uniquely, the project carries with it the aspirations of Mexico’s government for an informed, literate, and productive citizenry. José Vasconcelos Library is the means; “Hacia un país de lectores” [toward a nation of readers] is the end. A literate citizenry elevates and enlivens the culture, generates ideas that...

St. Petersburg is a city about to begin its fourth century. The city seems highly conscious of the significance of this particular birthday, intent on finding a means to express an accelerating transition from past to future. St. Petersburg is a city on the water, in the water, once accessed from the Neva River, and the sights and sounds of water, perpetually freezing or in motion in the city’s canals and rivers is a constant...

Samitaur Constructs, Developer St. Petersburg is not an assemblage of discrete buildings. Rather it is a chronology of monumental spaces that sweeps one along from plaza and canal to building and monument. Buildings originated in different eras and were built in various styles. But the consistent lessons are scale and power. There is no consigning the asymmetry of those public spaces to a sedate conclusion. To architecturally intervene in the area is to exploit its...

The Beehive is a new office building and conference center that was inserted into an existing fabric of warehouses. An existing two-story, wood building was removed and a new two-story structure was designed over the same footprint. The site is captured on three sides by existing buildings, leaving only approximately 35 feet of public street façade. The project is an exercise in creating a public image for the building that is capable of communicating its...

The bold geometric form and visible transition in section from a square to a triangle, appealed to the creative advertising agency that occupies this office building. The tenants felt that the building and the high visibility resulting from its prominent raised location reflected their own ethos of creativity and innovation. As a “gateway” to the campus-like cluster of buildings and landscape by EOM, the building announces to the world that something important and unique lies...

RECOLLECTING FORWARD The design strategy for the Queens Museum of Art uncovers the organizational strengths of the original building and simultaneously suggests new prospects for public participation, exhibition and performance. SITE The New York City Building was constructed as the cities pavilion for the 1939 World’s Fair. From 1946 to 1950 the building served as the first home of the United Nations before moving to it’s current location. The building was once again used as...

This project is part of a development known as "The Houses at Sagaponac," planned for a 65-acre site in the Hamptons, near the eastern tip of Long Island. The development is comprised of a series of homes designed by internationally recognized architects who were given the directive to achieve design excellence in a home of relatively modest scale and cost. According to the brief, "the project intends to inspire a shift in residential construction away...

Introduction Nine Los Angeles-based artists were commissioned to create participatory installations that investigate ways of seeing, drawing upon the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) as a resource, springboard, or provocation for visitor engagement. The charge to the artist had two specific conditions: that the installation incorporate an object from the collection, and that it appeal equally to both child and adult. An adult seeing the expected in an unexpected...

The Grand Egyptian Museum is a unique repository of culture --- religious, artistic, linguistic, historic --- a 3,000 year old ethos which has influenced (and continues to influence) the history which follows. The durability, the power, the continuing mystery of the Egyptian story --- a masterfully controlled definition of a world and its culture ---is almost incomprehensible today. How to give this story an architectural form is the question. And the answer requires a re-inventing...

The urban condition is characterized by constant change, renewal and incidental encounters. The physical urban fabric reflects this state of transformation. Our project takes advantage of the inherent qualities accumulated by accretion over time by incorporating existing features, conceiving our intervention as an overlay of change onto an existing structure. The site for this project is within a post-war industrial zone that is slowly transforming into a vital center for creative production. Our client desired...

The Hayden Tower project occupies a three-sided property with street access from the south. The triangular site is filled with a single story 14 foot clear loft with a parking roof deck above. Auto access is up an entry ramp to the parking deck with stairs/elevators to the building’s interior. In the central area of the site a ground level public plaza offers seats for outdoor performances, or simply lounging, sitting, or sunning. Pedestrian entry...

The project adjoins National Boulevard, a major north-south Los Angeles thoroughfare. The curving north/west elevation of the building is prominently in view for this high speed traffic. The corner of National Boulevard and Hayden Avenue is a prominent automobile gateway to the Hayden Tract, a group of new commercial and performing arts facilities.The large office space and parking requirements, as well as the 45’ height limit dictated the long, low building profile. The regularity of...

The two office buildings were originally part of an uninterrupted fabric of wood frame truss roofed warehouses that had been added to sporadically since the 1940’s. The design strategy involved a “Haussmanization” of the original agglomeration of buildings. Most of the old construction was demolished, cut out and removed on existing column support lines using dimensions that allowed the required interior footages and, in addition, on-grade parking between the two buildings. Since surface parking was...

A campus-like site with six buildings currently under construction and a total of more than 300,000 square feet of production and post-production facilities requires substantial additional parking. The parking structure is straightforward and inexpensive -- steel frame, metal deck, regular bays and ingress/egress ramps attached at opposite ends of the western face. On the western portion of the top level of the garage, over the parking entry, a new office structure is planned. Though the...

The Umbrella was originally designed as an outdoor performance balcony for the “Green Umbrella,” an experimental concert series put on by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. The fundamental design intention was to provide an outdoor venue for a small number of muscians who would perform on the balcony for an audience seated below. The interior was designed to accommodate numerous different performance arrangements from multiple small venues to a 30 to 40-person orchestra. PERFORMANCE SPACE...

A 26 acre Santa Monica mountain top site adjacent to the Mulholland scenic highway holds a building program including a main house for a family of four, a home office, gardens, recreational space including a tennis court, pool, and cabana, a gazebo, and an entry gate station. Program: 4 Buildings; main house, guest-house, grandparent's house, and cabana atop a 26-acre site, pools, gardens, new access road, and horse stables. Area: total 24,000 sq.ft. Selected Publication:...

The project is a health club designed to accommodate the recreation needs of neighborhood professionals. The new project will adjoin an existing dance facility - Conjunctive Points Dance Studio. The local built environment is an amalgam of one-story industrial structures. The new project intervenes in the existing complex: removing a portion of the existing fabric replacing it with new construction, and re-connecting the old organization with the new. The street level floor accommodates gym space,...

The original site is part of an existing sawtooth warehouse in a former manufacturing zone. The new tenants, a software design company, needed office, conference, computer facilities, and open areas for informal interaction. The front element of the building is a continuously changing surface in counterpoint to extremely regular lines of masonry. The element also serves as the front windows for the executive offices and creates the space for the executive conference room. Program: Office...

The Duesseldorf project acknowledges two fundamental planning responsibilities: the first is to discover new relationships between the harbor site and the existing city; the second is to integrate the current order of streets, buildings, traffic, and development parcels in the new proposal. The old city makes way for the new; the new city accommodates the old. A major portion of the project site is a metaphorical "finger" of land, a peninsula surrounded by water on...

Eric Owen Moss Architects and owners Frederick and Laurie Smith have been at work on this urban re-design project since 1988. The planning conception includes a portion of Central Los Angeles bounded by the Ballona Creek, La Cienega Boulevard and Jefferson Avenue; the Hayden Tract area of Culver City along Hayden Avenue and National Boulevard; and the neighborhood east and south of the intersection of Washington and Ince Boulevards in Culver City. Together the three...

The design of 3535 Hayden Avenue reflects the necessity of providing a unified working environment for a high profile graphics company, while allowing privacy between groups operating within the organization. The firm often handles multiple clients competing for the same projects and must maintain a high-level of discretion within the company.The building integrates bow-string trusses that were salvaged from an existing industrial facility. Uniting bold geometric forms with the existing truss system creates a work...

South of Barcelona, midway between Spain and North Africa, is the Catalan island of Ibiza - a burgeoning tourist center with a current resident population of eighty-five thousand, and a disproportionate visiting population of approximately two million. Over the millennia since the Bronze Age, the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs and the current Catalans have left a remarkable built record of their cultures on the island. Ibiza City and San Antonio are the two...

On the outskirts of Vienna, adjacent to the Autobahn, are four cylindrical masonry thanks, 60 meters in diameter and 65 meters high. The tanks, each with a steel and wood domed roof, were built at the end of the nineteenth century to hold natural gas that was piped to Vienna. Because of their historic role in the city, the exterior facades of the tanks must be preserved. Mr. Gunther Bishoff, the client, asked four architects...

The project proposes a total of 70 housing units in two buildings on two sites. The project begins with a strategy that associates the architect’s concept of Chinese calligraphy with the design of two Vienna housing blocks. The architectural calligraphy correlates a conceptual-pictorial language with an invented form-language for the design of buildings. Just as the combining of calligraphy symbols results in pictographic written concepts, the combining of the building “calligs” coalesce in a sequence...

The project, a division headquarters for the Kodak Company, was the first project built in Central Los Angeles after the 1992 riots. The completion of such a visionary and daring project, in an otherwise disregarded area, lured innovative tenants into the defunct industrial tract catalyzing growth and rejuvenation. Since the introduction of this iconic structure into Hayden Tract the area has experienced a 500% increase in property values and presently fosters a thriving work environment...

The Contemporary Jewish Museum project involves the adaptive reuse of the long-abandoned historic Jessie Street Power Substation located off Mission Street in the heart of Southern San Francisco's burgeoning Yerba Buena cultural district. According to the Museum's vision statement, 'With the new building, the 20-year-old Contemporary Jewish Museum continues its evolution from a small, community-based art museum into a major cultural facility, reflected by an expanded mission. At the heart of the Museum’s activities are...

The Ince Theater is to be situated within an existing parking lot contained on three sides by existing structures at the eastern edge of a newly developed Culver City downtown. Once built, the parking lot will be relocated underground and the site transformed into a public park. The theater will seat 450 for live performance and cinema. The roof will accommodate 80 people as an amphitheater focused toward an exterior projection screen salvaged for a...

The Box was originally designed as a private dining and meeting room for a restaurant. The client then changed the program in order to attract the emerging technical industry that was developing in the area. An existing industrial warehouse was renovated to contain new office space. The Box, located on the roof of the office, became a private conference/meeting room and explores the process of inserting a new building into an existing structure. The Box...

This project is a consequence of the careful intersection of four elements, two existing, two new. The original building at the corner of Hayden Avenue and National Boulevard, a major Culver City intersection, was a manufacturing center for airplane engines. Engines moved along an assembly line of rigid steel frames to the corner where they were loaded onto freight trains. These frames are used to organize the entrance hall, public circulation, and lobby space of...

The house is located on an 80’ x 180’ site, typical of the residential side of West Los Angeles. The clients should be acknowledged because Tracy and Linda had a lot to do with what this house came to be. The kitchen is where they entertain, so that space became the focal element of the building – the place to hang out. The essential component of the house is a three level hybrid cylindrical/conical volume...

Multiple uses are anticipated for the proposed theater at Vesey Street Turnaround in Battery Park. And multiple interpretations are plausible. The project is an open-air amphi-theater-in-the-round with outdoor projection platform and large video screen. The theater accommodates small scale performances of various kinds held night or day. The facility can be used like Hyde Park as a forum for purveyors of current wisdom(s) to stand up and yell. Below the outdoor stage is an enclosed...

This guest house was designed like a toy for the Aronoffs, their employees, guests, and children. The building can be climbed on, examined, and used as a viewing platform. The building location and the configuration of floors and windows maximizes spectacular and diverse views of the forest surrounding this site in the Santa Monica mountains. Program: Guest House Selected Publication: KA (Korean Architects), monograph, February 1997 L'ARCA November 1994

The Central Housing Office building is constructed on a sloping site facing a major campus entry point at the University of California, Irvine. The Central Housing Office Building is in charge of on campus dormitories and apartments. It is composed of four departments and has a staff of 25 who assist faculty, students, and administrators with housing problems. Two types of work spaces are provided: an open work station where housing staff meets the public...

On a main thoroughfare in Culver City, five warehouses adjoin one another, forming a single building. The dilapidated warehouses, all with different structural systems, were united by a new entrance and public corridor to create interior spaces of great clarity, richness, and variety. The buildings, originally constructed between the 1920s and 1940s, are all long-span spaces with clerestory windows facing either east or north. The client’s intention for renovating the dilapidated buildings was to create...

Designed and executed in phases over the course of four years, the Ince Office Complex is an exuburant and highly detailed response to an existing dilapidated 1940's industrial area. Originally composed of four discrete buildings, the finished complex has been transformed into a unified whole by a common architectural language. This language takes advantage of existing conditions to create spaces layered between the old and the new. Together, the Paramount Laundry Building, Lindblade Tower, Gary...

The petal house was originally built in the 1950's, one story with a detached garage, just north of the Santa Monica freeway in west Los Angeles. The project was a unique opportunity for the architect to share with the owners in the asking of a number of fundamental questions about the conception of the building and its meaning in their lives. Together we considered whether we could acknowledge both the original bungalow design and simultaneously...