About this talk

Running time: 26 minutes

Eric Owen Moss, born in New York, is a Californian at heart. He trained as an architect at UCLA, Berkeley and Harvard and opened his own office in Los Angeles in 1976. His work has won many awards, and he is internationally recognised as one of the mainstays of the avant garde.

Moss is no ordinary architect. Not for him contexturalism or conservation. From 1987 he has worked with an equally un-ordinary client, the developer Frederick Samitaur-Smith and his wife Laurie Samitaur-Smith, and together they have changed the face of a run-down industrial area of Los Angeles, Culver City, transforming it into a place that tempts self-respecting corporations away from up-market districts like Century City.

Moss expresses enormous admiration for the vision and tenacity of the Smiths and shows, among other projects, a number of innovative buildings they have conceived together. He ponders the perennial question "What is truth?" and concludes that possibly it is the tension between opposing issues. Thus, in his architecture, he revels in contradiction.

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