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ERIC OWEN MOSS

Ince Theater

Culver City

ERIC OWEN MOSS:

In the Ince Theater there is a palpable tension between extroverted and introverted pushing. If one gives, the other immediately takes.

The theater sits in the middle of a park that demarcates the eastern edge of the newly developed Culver City downtown. The theater seats 450 people inside and eighty on the roof, where there is a big screen salvaged from a local drive-in theater that was about to be demolished. We're going to transport it to the site and show videos on the roof, messages, advertisements, news. Not so introverted.

Conceptually the building is a duel not only between the obligations of inside and outside, but also between Pythagoras and his arch-enemy, but I don't know how to say who that is. Maybe the sound "om." How do you physically represent in architecture what can't even be circumscribed conceptually? So it's unrecognizable; the anti-3,4,5 triangle. It's anti-Euclidean, anti-system/quantity/measure. Pythagoras grows out of the limitless and disappears into the formless.

Here there are pieces of three spheres; the exterior at the top is a ruptured surface, nominally for acoustical reasons. From the ground you can see, but not hear, what's going on in the roof theater. It's isolated sonically. The technical-acoustical argument came retrospectively, after the decision to obligate the surface as the antithesis of the sphere. Another acoustical wall obviates the spheres inside. So there are two "oms." disingenuously related to the transmission of sound, that contest conceptual primacy with the spheres.

The theater manifests the Gary Group hypothesis; you might get to the truth-as contradiction by stretching the extremes, but by not insisting on either end. Interesting that Stealth insists on the ends-does it get at the truth?

This project is a transmutation to built form of a felt condition in me. That condition underlies what you see, how I understand, and the building is a way of putting that down.

The way to understand the big steal beam that wraps around the sphere is that it is not a circumference. The beam follows the seating profile; it doesn't conform to the sphere's regular geometry. Then there are secondary ribs, columns/beams, that conform to the curve of the sphere, perpendicular to the major ring beams. So the secondary beams depend on the geometry of both the sphere and the rings, which depend on pragmatic, internal circumstances. As the rings change position, so the secondary supports, which have right angle obligations to the rings.

The Ince Theater stretches the spacial prospect. To accomplish that I had to break out of whatever constraint exist in formulating any recognizable geometry. I had to find a way to build geometric antithesis. Somebody called this conflict Dionysian versus Apollonian. Apollo is cerebral, but Dionysus is supposed to exist outside the intellect. In my case, both the Dionysus/Apollo conflict is an accurate forecast of my sensibility.