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Eric Owen Moss

The Gary Group

Culver City

ERIC OWEN MOSS:

To what extend is the theorizing of the building part of the visible understanding of the building? Is the building what it is, or how it came to be? Is it the end or the sequence of development?

I put the building out there and people pick it up and misunderstand it, sometimes in imaginative ways. But they never pick it up exactly the way I put it down. I think that has to do with seeing and what precedes seeing - how you look at something and understand it, or not, as a consequence of either what you bring to it or what it can teach you; a way of learning to think that you don't yet know.

My buildings aspire to teach you to think in a different way, meaning the prospects exists that you would think again about how you think.

The earlier work investigated overlapping geometric entities; the interior space. Now it is the space between inside and outside where geometries dance. The space in-between is flexing-inside of the outside and outside of the inside.

I am using the fundamental instrument, geometry. So much energy has been spent in the last twenty years not dealing with space, with volume, with the core concern of architecture. The subject is stretching space- architecture's perpetual prospect. How to do that?

It's not spacial strangeness I am after, it is the tension between the understandable and the un-understandable. The experience seems strange because it isn't immediately grasped. It's not strange. That's not what I am about, though sometimes people characterize the work that way.

My work is an attempt to build, very incisively, the effort to understand - a very intense effort notwithstanding the fact that it's not likely to be successful (but it might be). It's a perpetual maybe; that the space could become intelligble or graspable or manageable exists solely as a prospect. Architecture is life is space - the form-language of space. Architecture can't talk. It's not so much a translation from spoken language to space; it's the transmutated conversation from conceptual content to space in architecture, the way Goya would speak in paint or Kafka in words. Architecture's form-language makes space.

Sometimes I can see pivot points or jumps. The Petal House was a jump. The Gary Group was a leap. It was the first time I raised the issue of truth as a contradiction, what I'm calling balance or the problem of balance; balance looking for imbalance, imbalance looking for balance. What is precarious and most fragile is also the most precious, but what's most fragile is also the most durable. Hold on and give it future. The Gary group sustains the fragile. Buildings can do that. Buildings can freeze the poignant in a way that a human institution can't.At certain times it works; you hit it. The Gary Group's tilting front wall could be accounted for by a conventional structuralist exegesis; what holds what, what cause, what effect. Very intentionally I tried to abrogate or confuse the argument, but not totally lose it, so that a tiny cause might have an enormous effect. Or an enormous cause might have almost no effect, which is a way of disowning the empirical pedrigree I inherited.

The wall of the Gary Group touches on that. It leans, but is its inclination to fall or to straighten up?