Eric Owen Moss Architects: If not now, when?

With Tom Farrage & Co. and Buro Happold
Opening Reception: 04.24.09, 7-9pm
Discussion between Eric Owen Moss and Jeffrey Kipnis: Date/Time TBD

The exhibition, on view from April 10 through June 14, re-examines the content of two previous Moss office projects – the 1998 Wexner Center for the Arts exhibition, Fabrications, and the premises of the Bondage tower at La Cienega and Jefferson Boulevards in Los Angeles. The installation that will hang from the ceiling of the SCI-Arc Gallery reexamines the ubiquitous architectural form of the grid in conversation with the curvilinear ribbons that surround it. The form contests the grid of the surrounding concrete gallery space, and by implication, the enduring grid as a matter of form that continues to inhabit the planning and architectural discourse.

The exhibition is comprised of a hanging structure extending from the ceiling, wrapped in curvilinear ribbons, and rows of folding chairs extending from the four walls of the gallery and facing towards the center. The chairs are arranged with rigid aisles, but the circular area underneath the hanging structure remains open. The installation encourages an audience to assemble, to observe, and to engage with the grid-in-bondage discourse (which may or may not actually transpire). Following Moss’ two previous projects mentioned above, If not now, when? encourages a continued discussion of the grid as the conceptual premise in architecture.

The installation will be fabricated by a team of SCI-Arc students led by SCI-Arc instructors Tom Farrage, Farrage & Co., and Matthew Melnyk, Buro Happold, under the supervision of Eric Owen Moss Architects.

If not now, when? by Eric Owen Moss

In 1998 the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio joined with SFMOMA and NYMOMA in a three museum exhibition and debate examining the intersection of new conceptual design ideas with the burgeoning new capacity to construct objects which, so often in the past, could only be imagined.

The Wexner is architect Peter Eisenman’s effort to finally exhaust the promise of the grid as an ordering and space making mechanism. The galleries present the grid as floor, as wall, as roof, as glazing system, and as lighting, and structure. But there was more: the tilted grid, the bent grid, the folded grid. Grids uber alles.

The Moss office in its installation offered the Wexner an entirely different perceptual and space making option. The grid qua grid is centerless, a conceptual neutrality that theoretically extends in every direction, endless, and without a focus. The Moss alternative examined a contrary ordering mechanism, the curve. The curve suggests a different spatial prospect -- the possibility of center. So in the lexicon of shapes, no matter how sophisticated the discussion of intricate geometries, the essential juxtaposition is centered and centerlessness.

Moss built the missing center in the Wexner, supplying the geometric opportunity [intentionally] omitted from the original architect’s design. We called that foreign vantage point the Dancing Bleachers.

Not long after the three-museum exhibition, the Moss office was invited to design a high rise structure in Los Angeles at the corner of la Cienega Boulevard and Jefferson Avenue, adjacent to a long anticipated surface rail stop intended to connect the Westside of Los Angeles with downtown. The site is located in the south-central portion of Los Angeles in a poor, minority area, well known for two race riots, but for little else -- left dormant for years as various other parts of the city were re-developed.

The high rise project was designed, applying the antithetical grid premise first used in the Dancing Bleachers. The tower buildings – there were initially two – were designed without the conventional orthogonal order of columns and beams, but were rather supported with a dense, curvilinear order of ribbons, neither beams nor columns, that densely circumscribed and supported the building.

The tower is called Bondage.

Construction will begin in 2010.

The Moss exhibit at Sci-Arc scheduled for April, 2009, re-examines both the content of the Wexner exhibition and the premises of the Bondage Tower at la Cienega and Jefferson. Again, 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 discourse is contested by the curvilinear spatial nemesis

Architecture needs an enemy.